Virtual and augmented reality tools for teleoperation: Improving distant immersion and perception

Abstract

This paper reports on the development of a collaborative system enabling to tele-operate groups of robots. The general aim is to allow a group of tele-operators to share the control of robots. This system enables the joint team of operators and robots to achieve complex tasks such as inspecting an area or exploring unknown parts of an unknown environment. Thanks to virtual and augmented reality techniques, a Virtual and Augmented Collaborative Environment (VACE) is built. This last supports a N * M * K scheme: N 1;N tele-operators control M 1;M robots at K 1;K abstraction levels. Indeed, our VACE allows to N people to control any robot at different abstraction's levels (from individual actuator's control K = 1 to final status specification K = 3). On the other hand, the VACE enables to build synthetic representations of the robots and their world. Robots may appear to tele-operators as individuals or reduced to a single virtual entity. We present in this paper an overview of this system and an application, namely a museum visit. We show how visitors can control robots and improve their immersion using a head-tracking system combined with a VR helmet to control the active vision systems on the remote mobile robots. We also introduce the ability to control the remote robots configuration, at a group level. We finally show how Augmented and Virtual Reality add-ons are included to ease the execution of remote tasks. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.