Abstract
There is a significant amount of synergy between virtual reality (VR) and the field of robotics. However, it has only been in approximately the past five years that commercial immersive VR devices have been available to developers. This new availability has led to a rapid increase in research using VR devices in the field of robotics, especially in the development of VR interfaces for operating robots. In this paper, we present a systematic review on VR interfaces for robot operation that utilize commercially available immersive VR devices. A total of 41 papers published between 2016–2020 were collected for review following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Papers are discussed and categorized into five categories: (1) Visualization, which focuses on displaying data or information to operators; (2) Robot Control and Planning, which focuses on connecting human input or movement to robot movement; (3) Interaction, which focuses on the development of new interaction techniques and/or identifying best interaction practices; (4) Usability, which focuses on user experiences of VR interfaces; and (5) Infrastructure, which focuses on system architectures or software to support connecting VR and robots for interface development. Additionally, we provide future directions to continue development in VR interfaces for operating robots.
Highlights
Even though the concept of virtual reality (VR) has been around since the 1960s [1], its usage in the field of robotics has only been widely adopted in robot-assisted surgery [2,3,4] and robot-assisted rehabilitation [5,6,7]
Papers are discussed and categorized into five categories: (1) Visualization, which focuses on displaying data or information to operators; (2) Robot Control and Planning, which focuses on connecting human input or movement to robot movement; (3) Interaction, which focuses on the development of new interaction techniques and/or identifying best interaction practices; (4) Usability, which focuses on user experiences of VR interfaces; and (5) Infrastructure, which focuses on system architectures or software to support connecting VR and robots for interface development
We present a systematic review of the use of virtual reality in developing interfaces for interacting with robots
Summary
Even though the concept of virtual reality (VR) has been around since the 1960s [1], its usage in the field of robotics has only been widely adopted in robot-assisted surgery [2,3,4] and robot-assisted rehabilitation [5,6,7]. Robots can be used in VR to help provide more immersive VR experiences by providing haptic feedback to users [9,10] or by providing items for user interaction [11,12]. The lack of VR integration in the field of robotics has been largely caused by the absence of availability and affordability of commercial VR devices. In the past decade though, there has been considerable advancement to make VR devices with immersive visualization and 6 degree-of-freedom (DOF) tracking commercially available and relatively affordable. With these advancements, there has been an increase in utilizing VR in the field of robotics. One area that has seen particular growth is in utilizing VR devices for human-robot interaction and collaboration
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