VitRob Pipeline: A Seamless Teleoperation Pipeline for Advanced Virtual Reality - Robot Interface Applied for Precision Agriculture

摘要

The evolution of robots is continuously advancing to greater heights. Virtual reality as a tool provides an immersive experience in a 3D environment that allows users to visualise and interact with robots in such environments. This human-robot interaction benefits users with better situational awareness to effectively perform remote tasks. This paper proposes a seamless teleoperation pipeline that interfaces virtual reality with robots for precision agriculture tasks. This pipeline allows users to visualise and control robots from a virtual environment thereby giving a telepresence advantage to users. Robotics Operating System (ROS) is utilised to accept data from a Unity gaming platform. A jackal robot and panda robotic manipulator equipped with the required sensors are utilised to evaluate this pipeline. The camera data, odometry data, velocity data and joystick commands are interchanged between the virtual environment and real platforms. Further evaluation is conducted for 6DoF pose application where a target fruit pose is estimated and manipulated within the virtual world while imitating similar actions in the real world to grasp/harvest the fruit. This attempt exhibit the possibility of remote agricultural task through this pipeline. The results of the evaluation prove the efficiency and robustness of the pipeline.