VR operated robots could cut out the commute for factory workers

The group, from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) used an Oculus Rift headset linked to a Rethink Robotics Baxter robot to place the user in a VR control room with multiple sensor displays, making it feel like they’re inside the robot’s head.

Using Oculus’ controllers, users can interact with controls that appear in the virtual space to open and close the hand grippers to pick up, move, and retrieve items. A user can plan movements based on the distance between the arm’s location marker and their hand while looking at the live display of the arm.

To make these movements possible, the human’s space is mapped into the virtual space, and the virtual space is then mapped into the robot space to provide a sense of co-location.

The system is also more flexible compared to previous systems that require many resources.

Other systems might extract 2-D information from each camera, build out a full 3-D model of the environment, and then process and redisplay the data.