Combining virtual reality with camera data and a wearable sensor jacket to facilitate robot teleoperation

Unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) with differing degrees of autonomy are increasingly used for routine tasks, albeit still widely controlled through teleoperation in safety-critical contexts. We pro-pose to complement a traditional approach of showing camera views on a 2D screen with an immersive Virtual Environment (VE), displaying camera data with depth cues around a model of the robot. Combining both approaches with a wearable sensor jacket, the operator can choose the best one for the current task. Preliminary experiments showed that even untrained operators can successfully solve pick and place tasks with high accuracy with our system.