ReachVox: Clutter-free Reachability Visualization for Robot Motion Planning in Virtual Reality

Figure 1: Remote Human-Robot-Collaboration: a) A remote operator needs to align the body of an engine so that a robot arm can access and weld it (a linear arrangement of white points represents the required welding locations). Through this, the user controls the position and rotation of the engine, enabling her to align the engine efficiently. The concentration of unreachable locations along the task area's right side indicates to the user the need to rotate the engine further toward the robot. Human-Robot-Collaboration can enhance workflows by leveraging the mutual strengths of human operators and robots. Planning and understanding robot movements remain major challenges in this domain. This problem is prevalent in dynamic environments that might need constant robot motion path adaptation. Through a user study (n=20), we indicate the strength of the visualization relative to a point-based reachability check-up. Collaboration between human operators and robots can leverage the strengths of both. Humans can better understand ad hoc situations and control them so that they are easily accessible by the robot.