VETO: An Immersive Virtual Environment for Tele-Operation

• Main Authors: Brandon Wilson, Matthew Bounds, David McFadden, Jace Regenbrecht, Loveth Ohenhen, Alireza Tavakkoli, Donald Loffredo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-06-01
• Series: Robotics
• Subjects: immersive virtual environments; tele-operation; immersive game clients; dynamic level generation; sensory fusion; autonomous operation
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2218-6581/7/2/26

This work investigates an over-arching question: how can an immersive virtual environment be connected with its intelligent physical counterpart to allow for a more efficient man-machine collaboration. To this end, an immersive user interface for the purpose of robot tele-operation is designed. A large amount of sensory data is utilized to build models of the world and its inhabitants in a way that is intuitive to the operator and accurately represents the robot’s real-world state and environment. The game client is capable of handling multiple users, much like a traditional multiplayer game, while visualizing multiple robotic agents operating within the real world. The proposed Virtual Environment for Tele-Operation (VETO) architecture is a tele-operation system that provides a feature-rich framework to implement robotic agents into an immersive end-user game interface. Game levels are generated dynamically on a Graphic Processing Unit or GPU-accelerated server based on real-world sensor data from the robotic agents. A set of user studies are conducted to validate the performance of the proposed architecture compared to traditional tele-robotic applications. The experimental results show significant improvements in both task completion time and task completion rate over traditional tools.