Orbital HMD: An Intuitive Visual Interface for Robot Teleoperation: With Robotic Welding as Use Case

Robotic teleoperation has gained popularity in various applications, including the nuclear industry, where the experience and intelligence of a human operator is necessary for making complex decisions that are beyond the autonomy of robots. Human-robot interfaces that help strengthen an operator’s situational awareness without inducing excessive cognitive load are crucial to the success of teleoperation. This paper presents an intuitive visual interface that allows operators to simultaneously control a 6DOF camera platform and a robotic manipulator whilst experiencing the remote environment through a virtual reality head-mounted-display (VR-HMD). The proposed system, Orbital Head-Mounted Display (OHMD), utilizes head rotation tracking to command camera movement in azimuth and elevation directions around a fixation point located at a robot's end-effector. A human factor study was conducted to compare the interface acceptance, perceived workload, and task performance of OHMD with a conventional interface utilizing multiple fixed cameras (Array) and a standard head-mounted display implementation (HMD). Results show that both the OHMD and HMD interfaces significantly improve task performance, reduce perceived workload and increase interface acceptance compared to the Array interface. Whilst orbital head-mounted display excelled in usefulness, the standard HMD interface allowed operators to perform robotic welding tasks significantly faster. Still participants reported they preferred OHMD due to the increased assistance and freedom in viewpoint selection.Mechanical Engineerin