An Immersive Mirror-Reversal Interface for Teleoperated Bring-me Task using a Mobile Manipulator

One of the major tasks of assistive robots for future domestic applications is to bring objects requested by the user, which is called a “Bring-me Task.” Many of those previous studies including the Bring-me Task focus on the technologies to perform the task autonomously. However, object recognition, grasping, and navigation on autonomous robots are still difficult and not yet practical in a real-world unstructured environment. As an alternative approach, Bring-me Tasks by teleoperated robots have also been studied, but such systems require remote operators to perform the task for the user. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to the Teleoperated Bring-me Task in which a user teleoperates a robot by him/herself and receives an object from the robot. The user wears an HMD showing a mirror-reversal image from the viewpoint of the robot. The results from the experiments on the Teleoperated Bring-me Task suggest that the proposed interface with the mirror-reversal image improved the performance of receiving the object by hand compared with the original image. Furthermore, it was also confirmed that our interface improved the operability of the robot. (A video introducing the proposed method can be viewed¹¹https://youtu.be/Qwrj8tIK_lI?si=CgjGGOC4IZzgO-JC.)