A VR Teleoperation Suite with Manipulation Assist

Advances in the capabilities of technologies like virtual reality (VR) and their rapid proliferation at consumer price points, have made it much easier to integrate them into existing robotic frameworks. VR interfaces are promising for robotics for several reasons, including that they may be suitable for resolving many of the human performance issues associated with traditional robot teleoperation interfaces used for robot manipulation. In this systems-focused paper, we introduce and document the development of a VR-based robot control paradigm with manipulation assist control algorithm, which allows human operators to specify larger manipulation goals while leaving the low-level details of positioning, manipulation and grasping to the robot itself. For the community, we also describe system design challenges to our progress thus far.