Virtual Environments and Scenario Languages for Advanced Teleoperation of Groups of Real Robots: Real Case Application

This paper deals with the usage of virtual reality and scenario languages in the field of teleoperation: how to enable a group of teleoperators to control, in a collaborative way, groups of real robots, in turn collaborating with each other to achieve complex tasks; such tasks include inspecting a dangerous area or exploring a partially unknown environment. The main goal is to obtain efficient, natural and innovative interactions in such a context.We first present the usage of collaborative virtual environments (CVE) to obtain a unified, simplified,virtual abstraction of distributed, complex, real robots. We show how this virtual environment offers a peculiar ability: to free teleoperators from space and time constraints. Then we present our original usage of scenario languages to describe complex and collaborative tasks in a natural and flexible way. Finally, we validate the proposed framework through our teleoperation platform ViRAT.