A 3D Mixed Reality Interface for Human-Robot Teaming

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mixed-reality interface for human-robot teaming that enables real-time visualization and control of robots and environment mapping through a 3D overlay, enhancing situational awareness and command efficiency.

Contribution

It presents a novel mixed-reality system integrating real-time multi-agent SLAM, 3D visualization, and intuitive drag-and-drop control for human-robot interaction.

Findings

Effective visualization of robot locations and environment maps.

Improved user control with drag-and-drop interface.

Validated through user study and real-world deployment.

Abstract

This paper presents a mixed-reality human-robot teaming system. It allows human operators to see in real-time where robots are located, even if they are not in line of sight. The operator can also visualize the map that the robots create of their environment and can easily send robots to new goal positions. The system mainly consists of a mapping and a control module. The mapping module is a real-time multi-agent visual SLAM system that co-localizes all robots and mixed-reality devices to a common reference frame. Visualizations in the mixed-reality device then allow operators to see a virtual life-sized representation of the cumulative 3D map overlaid onto the real environment. As such, the operator can effectively "see through" walls into other rooms. To control robots and send them to new locations, we propose a drag-and-drop interface. An operator can grab any robot hologram in a 3D mini map and drag it to a new desired goal pose. We validate the proposed system through a user study and real-world deployments. We make the mixed-reality application publicly available at https://github.com/cvg/HoloLens_ros.