Immersive Augmented Reality Environment for the Teleoperation of Maintenance Robots

A teleoperation system for maintenance robots using an Augmented Reality (AR) environment as a human-robot interface is proposed. The components at the remote maintenance site are reproduced in the local environment of the operator using a mixture of physical and virtual objects. The AR environment enhances situational awareness and reduces cognitive load by immersing the operator in a representation of the remote site and overlaying information related to the maintenance task on the corresponding objects. Another contribution of the proposed system is an intuitive method for defining ad-hoc robotic maintenance tasks without the need for robot programming knowledge.