Intuitive visual teleoperation for UGVs using free-look augmented reality displays

For numerous real-world applications teleoperated unmanned guided vehicles (UGVs) can quite successfully assist a human in fulfilling her mission objectives. It is important for the specialists to get an overview of the site quickly and with as intuitive means as possible. Our approach to an intuitive human-machine interface for visually teleoperating UGVs makes use of a spherical camera in combination with the Virtual Reality Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Oculus Rift. The Oculus Rift is equipped with an inertial measurement unit to track the teleoperator's head orientation. With this orientation information, the current field of view is synthesized from the panoramic image coming from the spherical camera allowing a free look for the operator. In this paper, we present the hardware setup and the software system of our free-look HMD approach on our UGV. Our approach allows for multi-view, i.e., several operators can collaborate on a given task. What is more, we augment the spherical image with heading and orientation information of the robot as well as of other viewers. Our preliminary evaluation with a number of untrained user suggests that our free-look HMD offers an intuitive multi-view human-machine interface for teleoperating UGVs.