Impact of VR Technology on a Human in Semi-autonomous Multi-robot Navigation: Control-Theoretic Perspective

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate a scenario of one-human-multiple-robot navigation in three dimensions, and examine the impacts of the VR (Virtual Reality) technology on human properties from a control-theoretic perspective. We start by reviewing a passivity-based distributed control architecture that takes complementary interactions such that motion synchronization is autonomously completed by a distributed robot controller while the operator is dedicated to robot navigation. Due to the limited human capability of 3-D recognition and limited dimensionality on the real-time manipulability, 3-D navigation is completely different from that of the one- or two-dimensional case and we need to carefully design both feedback and command interfaces between the operator and robots. Specifically, we employ two different pairs of the interfaces, traditional joystick controller with 2-D display monitor and HMD (Head Mounted Display) with VR controller. We then build human models from the operation data with these interfaces on a human-in-the-loop simulator. Through the human modeling, we present two novel findings: (i) VR interfaces improve the accuracy of the human model with about 25∼45% of fitting ratio, which must drastically eases the design of human-robot collaboration systems, (ii) VR interfaces enhance human passivity, which is a key to ensuring closed-loop stability for the human-in-the-loop system.