Evaluation of Intuitive VR-based HRI for Simulated Industrial Robots

Abstract: While the accessibility and technology behind industrial robots is improving as well as becomingless expensive, the installation and conguration of industrial robot cells still proves tobe an expensive venture, especially for small and mid-sized companies. It is therefore of greatinterest to simulate robot cell installations, both for verication of system functionality as wellas for demonstration purposes for clients.However, the construction and conguration of a simulated robot cell is a time-consumingprocess and requires expertise that is often only found in engineers who are experienced withsoftware programming and spacial kinematics. If the process were to be simplied it would bringgreat advantages not only concerning the more ecient use of the time of software engineers butalso in marketing applications.As this paper will show, the use of Virtual Reality (VR) in simulating, displaying andcontrolling robots is a well investigated subject. It has been shown that VR can be used to showrobot simulation in more detail and to specify path movement in task programming. This paperfocuses upon nding and evaluating an intuitive Human Robot Interface (HRI) for interactingwith simulated robots using virtual reality.An HRI is proposed and evaluated, using the Oculus Rift Head Mounted Display (HMD)to display a 3-dimensional (3D) VR environment of a Robot Cell in ABB RobotStudio. Usingmarker-based tracking enabled by ARToolkit, the user's position in real world coordinates isforwarded to the virtual world, along with the position and orientation of a hand-held tool thatallows the user to manipulate the robot targets that are part of the simulated robots program.The system as an HRI was successful in giving the user a strong sense of immersion andgiving them a much better understanding of the robot cell and the positions of the dened robottargets. All participants were also able to dene robot targets much faster with the proposedinterface than when using the standard RobotStudio tools. Results show that the performance ofthe tracking system is adequate with regards to latency and accuracy for updating user positionand hand-held tool when using a video capture resolution of 640x480.