Teleoperation by seamless transitions in real and virtual world environments

This study investigates operability and acceptability issues in the teleoperation of robots. Prior studies have proposed efficient approaches to increase human perceptual ability and robot autonomy but with reduced operability and acceptance. We propose a novel teleoperation method that overcomes the weaknesses of existing approaches while inheriting their strengths. The key feature of our method is switching the teleoperated robot world from real to virtual. The user study results showed that the proposed method offered an improved user experience compared to the conventional methods, while task efficiency was equivalent in all methods. The contributions of this paper include the proposal of the teleoperation method by seamless switching between real and virtual space, the proposal of an image transformation method and visual effect to achieve seamless switching, and verification of the practicality of the proposed system through experiments on actual mobile robots.