ReachVox: Clutter-free Reachability Visualization for Robot Motion Planning in Virtual Reality

TL;DR

ReachVox introduces a minimalistic reachability visualization in VR to improve human-robot collaboration, demonstrating its effectiveness through a user study in dynamic environments.

Contribution

The paper proposes ReachVox, a novel clutter-free reachability visualization method for robot motion planning in VR, validated by user study results.

Findings

ReachVox enhances understanding of robot reachability in VR.

User study shows improved collaboration with ReachVox over point-based checks.

Clutter-free visualization aids dynamic environment planning.

Abstract

Human-Robot-Collaboration can enhance workflows by leveraging the mutual strengths of human operators and robots. Planning and understanding robot movements remain major challenges in this domain. This problem is prevalent in dynamic environments that might need constant robot motion path adaptation. In this paper, we investigate whether a minimalistic encoding of the reachability of a point near an object of interest, which we call ReachVox, can aid the collaboration between a remote operator and a robotic arm in VR. Through a user study (n=20), we indicate the strength of the visualization relative to a point-based reachability check-up.