Teleoperated Robot Grasping in Virtual Reality Spaces

Abstract-- Despite recent advancement in virtual reality technology, teleoperating a high DoF robot to complete dexterous tasks in cluttered scenes remains difficult. In this work, we propose a system that allows the user to teleoperate a Fetch robot to perform grasping in an easy and intuitive way, through exploiting the rich environment information provided by the virtual reality space. Our system has the benefit of easy transferability to different robots and different tasks, and can be used without any expert knowledge. We tested the system on a real fetch robot, and a video demonstrating the effectiveness of our system can be seen at https://youtu.be/1-xW2Bx_Cms I. INTRODUCTION Robot teleoperation is a useful tool for handling tasks that are hard to be completed autonomously by robots, such as the DARPA Robotics Challenge [1]. The high DoF of the robot makes it hard to create 1-1 mapping from the controller inputs to robot actions.