Telerobotic Control in Virtual Reality

Abstract

More than 400 underwater sites in and around the U.S. are potentially contaminated with hazardous undetonated munitions due to military testing activities [1]. The main remediation methods currently employed are 1. sending divers to manually retrieve the munitions and 2. blowing the munitions in place. Manual remediation is dangerous to the divers and blow-in-place strategies are environmentally damaging and harmful to nearby marine life. Teleoperation is an alternative remediation method that does not put people's lives at risk, and, if successfully carried out, is environmentally friendly. However, traditional teleoperation methods suffer from unintuitive and ineffective operator input control due to limitations such as poor depth perception by viewing the worksite from 2D displays and poor operator input control methods by using awkward input devices. Virtual reality interfaces immerse users in simulated environments and allow them to view and interact with simulated objects naturally. In this work, intuitive and effective input control methods based on Virtual Reality were designed and implemented as a ROS (Robot Operating System) package to teleoperate a robot arm for the remediation of underwater munitions using commercial off-the-shelf VR hardware. The control methods and ROS package are generalizable for other telerobotic applications.