Immersive environment for robotic tele-operation

In various modern day situations, controlling a robot from a remote location is essential due to hazardous environmental conditions (for human operators) near the robot. Thus arises the need for an intuitive user interface for tele-operation, which must be efficient as well as easy to use. In this paper we present an innovative user interface and overall framework for robotic tele-operation and demonstrate its application to simple bin-picking and hole-packing tasks. We have adopted technologies from Virtual Reality (VR) systems for environment mapping and used modern interface devices to provide haptic feedback. The user interface of our framework renders a virtual replica of the remote site in which the virtual objects are animated based on the tracking information received from cameras and robot placed at the remote location. A haptic device is used by the human operator to control the remote robotic arm while simultaneously aided by the haptic feedback received from the robotic arm. A tele-operation system using our framework is developed in laboratory environment and the usability of our system is verified by a user survey.