A Virtual Reality Teleoperation Interface for Industrial Robot Manipulators

TL;DR

This paper presents a VR teleoperation interface tailored for industrial robot manipulators, addressing control challenges and proposing a filtering method to enable effective contact-rich manipulation tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a simplified filtering approach to improve VR teleoperation of industrial robots, overcoming limitations of standard control practices for such platforms.

Findings

Effective teleoperation in contact-rich tasks demonstrated

Filtering approach enables precise control despite black-box controllers

Method applicable to various industrial robot manipulators

Abstract

We address the problem of teleoperating an industrial robot manipulator via a commercially available Virtual Reality (VR) interface. Previous works on VR teleoperation for robot manipulators focus primarily on collaborative or research robot platforms (whose dynamics and constraints differ from industrial robot arms), or only address tasks where the robot's dynamics are not as important (e.g: pick and place tasks). We investigate the usage of commercially available VR interfaces for effectively teleoeprating industrial robot manipulators in a variety of contact-rich manipulation tasks. We find that applying standard practices for VR control of robot arms is challenging for industrial platforms because torque and velocity control is not exposed, and position control is mediated through a black-box controller. To mitigate these problems, we propose a simplified filtering approach to process command signals to enable operators to effectively teleoperate industrial robot arms with VR interfaces in dexterous manipulation tasks. We hope our findings will help robot practitioners implement and setup effective VR teleoperation interfaces for robot manipulators. The proposed method is demonstrated on a variety of contact-rich manipulation tasks which can also involve very precise movement of the robot during execution (videos can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhkCB9mOaBc)