Immersive Robot Control in Virtual Reality to Command Robots in Space Missions

Abstract

We present an approach to control a semi-autonomous robot team remotely under low bandwidth conditions with a single operator. Our approach utilises virtual reality and autonomous robots to create an immersive user interface for multi-robot control. This saves a big amount of bandwidth, just because there is no need to transfer a constant steam of camera images. The virtual environment for control only has to be transferred once to the control station and only has to be updated when the map is out of date. Also, the camera position can easily be changed in virtual reality for more overview on the robots situation. The parts of this approach can easily be transferred to applications on earth e.g. for semi-autonomous robots in hazardous areas or under water applications.