Teleoperating a Humanoid Robot with Virtual Reality

Teleoperating robots, particularly humanoid robots, from a remote environment remains a difficult problem. Significant research has been conducted in human-robot interaction for teleoperating mobile ground robots for both novice and experienced operators with a variety of interfaces and strategies; however, there is significantly less research on teleoperating humanoid robots. By their nature, humanoid robots tend to operate in very 3D environments, with variable terrain. With humanoid robots, much of the focus is on performing the tasks that a human would normally do, in the way a human would normally perform it, in the environment that the human would normally perform it in. This focus greatly increases task complexity and the required effort. 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 3D situation and task awareness while viewing a 2D screen. This is one area where 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 this paper, we will describe how we developed and created a VR interface to remotely control a humanoid robot and explain our methodology for the types of visualization and control we present.