Many manufacturing jobs require a
physical presence to operate machinery. But what if such jobs could be done
remotely? Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory (CSAIL) presented a virtual-reality (VR) system that lets you
teleoperate a robot using an Oculus Rift headset. The system embeds the user in
a VR control room with multiple sensor displays, making it feel like they are
inside the robot's head. By using gestures, users can match their movements to
the robot's to complete various tasks. The researchers even imagine that such a
system could help employ increasing numbers of jobless video-gamers by gamefying
manufacturing positions. The team demonstrated their VC control approach with
the Baxter humanoid robot from Rethink Robotics, but said that the approach can
work on other robot platforms and is also compatible with the HTC Vive headset.
The system mimics the homunculus
model of mind, the idea that there's a small human inside our brains
controlling our actions, viewing the images we see and understanding them for
us. While it's a peculiar idea for humans, for robots it fits: inside the robot
is a human in a control room, seeing through its eyes and controlling its
actions. Using Oculus' controllers, users can interact with controls that
appear in the virtual space to open and close the hand grippers to pick up,
move, and retrieve items. A user can plan movements based on the distance
between the arm's location marker and their hand while looking at the live
display of the arm. To make these movements possible, the human's space is
mapped into the virtual space, and the virtual space is then mapped into the
robot space to provide a sense of co-location. To test the system, the team
first teleoperated Baxter to do simple tasks like picking up screws or stapling
wires.
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