Baxter's Homunculus: Virtual Reality Spaces for Teleoperation in Manufacturing

Expensive specialized systems have hampered development of telerobotic systems for manufacturing systems. In this paper we demonstrate a telerobotic system which can reduce the cost of such system by leveraging commercial virtual reality(VR) technology and integrating it with existing robotics control software. The system runs on a commercial gaming engine using off the shelf VR hardware. This system can be deployed on multiple network architectures from a wired local network to a wireless network connection over the Internet. The system is based on the homunculus model of mind wherein we embed the user in a virtual reality control room. The control room allows for multiple sensor display, dynamic mapping between the user and robot, does not require the production of duals for the robot, or its environment. The control room is mapped to a space inside the robot to provide a sense of co-location within the robot. We compared our system with state of the art automation algorithms for assembly tasks, showing a 100% success rate for our system compared with a 66% success rate for automated systems. We demonstrate that our system can be used for pick and place, assembly, and manufacturing tasks.