A Tool for Organizing Key Characteristics of Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality for Human–Robot Interaction Systems: Synthesizing VAM-HRI Trends and Takeaways

Frameworks have begun to emerge to categorize virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (VAM) technologies that provide immersive, intuitive interfaces to facilitate human–robot interaction (HRI). These frameworks, however, fail to capture key characteristics of the growing subfield of VAM-HRI and can be difficult to consistently apply because of continuous scales. This work builds upon these prior frameworks through the creation of a tool for organizing key characteristics of VAM-HRI systems (TOKCS). The TOKCS discretizes the continuous scales used within prior works for more consistent classification and adds additional characteristics related to a robot’s internal model, anchor locations, manipulability, and the system’s software and hardware. To showcase the TOKCS’s capability, it is applied to the 10 papers from the Fourth International Workshop on VAM-HRI and examined for key trends and takeaways. These trends highlight the expressive capability of the TOKCS while also helping frame newer trends and future work recommendations for VAM-HRI research.