Virtual and Augmented Reality for Human/complex-systems interactions

Virtual Reality and the ViRAT platform are a support for our Researches conducted in the field of Teleoperation. Robotics still suffers from a lack of standardization[3], while every robot's manufacturer propose its own tools and programming environments.

Through VIRAT, we can work on the usage of standardized unified and collaborative VR environments, tools for abstracting robots, and new interfaces for Human/Robots interactions.

Our researches are focused on the communication between humans and a multi-robot environments, and the ability for a user to understand how a complex system can be teleoperated, according to his native skills to interact with natural complex systems such as other humans.

VR&AR are fantastic opportunities to immerse teleoperators in distant environments, with the ability to simplify the overloaded reality or to enhance points of interests with virtual indicators. It's also a way to evaluate the teleoperators in controlled conditions, in order to measure the quality of interfaces.

In an effective context, Virtual Environments allow to free teleoperators from space and time constraints: navigation in the history, prediction of trajectories, monitoring the scene from any point of view, etc. are some examples.

Three main pojects are conducted for those researches: how one user can teleoperate several robots, how several users can interact in the same environment to control one robot, and how several teleoperators can interact on several robots.