Spatial Computing and Intuitive Interaction: Bringing Mixed Reality and Robotics Together

TL;DR

This paper explores how spatial computing and mixed reality can enhance human-robot interaction through systems enabling mission planning, gesture control, and immersive teleoperation, demonstrating new collaborative possibilities.

Contribution

It introduces several human-robot systems leveraging spatial computing and mixed reality for innovative interaction methods and robot control.

Findings

Mixed reality improves human-robot collaboration

Spatial computing enables intuitive gesture-based control

New use cases for robots in inspection and teleoperation

Abstract

Spatial computing -- the ability of devices to be aware of their surroundings and to represent this digitally -- offers novel capabilities in human-robot interaction. In particular, the combination of spatial computing and egocentric sensing on mixed reality devices enables them to capture and understand human actions and translate these to actions with spatial meaning, which offers exciting new possibilities for collaboration between humans and robots. This paper presents several human-robot systems that utilize these capabilities to enable novel robot use cases: mission planning for inspection, gesture-based control, and immersive teleoperation. These works demonstrate the power of mixed reality as a tool for human-robot interaction, and the potential of spatial computing and mixed reality to drive the future of human-robot interaction.