Design of Virtual Reality for Humanoid Robots with Inspiration from Video Games

Abstract

Advances in robotics have led to breakthroughs in several areas, including the development of humanoid robots. There are now several different models of humanoid robots available, but operating them remains a difficult challenge. Current operator control interfaces for humanoid robots often require very experienced operators and significant amounts of time for planning. A large amount of the planning and cognitive load is attributable to the operator attempting to gain adequate three-dimensional (3D) situation awareness and task awareness while viewing an interface on a flat, two-dimensional (2D) screen. Virtual reality (VR) has enormous potential to provide benefits to allow the operator to quickly and accurately understand the state of a robot in a scanned 3D environment and to issue accurate commands with less cognitive load. In the gaming sphere, VR headsets remain a new and promising interface for playing video games. In some cases, existing video games are being ported over to VR and, in others, brand new games are being designed with VR in mind. Control schemes and best practices for VR are emerging within the video game industry. This paper aims to leverage their lessons learned and to apply them to the teleoperation of humanoid robots.