Reality Fusion: Robust Real-time Immersive Mobile Robot Teleoperation with Volumetric Visual Data Fusion

TL;DR

Reality Fusion is a real-time teleoperation system that fuses depth sensor data with photorealistic 3D environment rendering in VR, improving user performance and awareness during robot control.

Contribution

It introduces a novel volumetric data fusion framework for immersive robot teleoperation, combining depth sensing with high-quality environment rendering in real-time.

Findings

Enhanced user performance in teleoperation tasks

Improved situation awareness and user preferences

Open-source tools for replication and further research

Abstract

We introduce Reality Fusion, a novel robot teleoperation system that localizes, streams, projects, and merges a typical onboard depth sensor with a photorealistic, high resolution, high framerate, and wide field of view (FoV) rendering of the complex remote environment represented as 3D Gaussian splats (3DGS). Our framework enables robust egocentric and exocentric robot teleoperation in immersive VR, with the 3DGS effectively extending spatial information of a depth sensor with limited FoV and balancing the trade-off between data streaming costs and data visual quality. We evaluated our framework through a user study with 24 participants, which revealed that Reality Fusion leads to significantly better user performance, situation awareness, and user preferences. To support further research and development, we provide an open-source implementation with an easy-to-replicate custom-made telepresence robot, a high-performance virtual reality 3DGS renderer, and an immersive robot control package. (Source code: https://github.com/uhhhci/RealityFusion)