Effective Virtual Reality Teleoperation of an Upper-body Humanoid with Modified Task Jacobians and Relaxed Barrier Functions for Self-Collision Avoidance

Abstract-- We present an approach for retartgeting off-theshelf Virtual Reality (VR) trackers to effectively teleoperate an upper-body humanoid while ensuring self-collision-free motions. Key to the effectiveness was the proper assignment of trackers to joint sets via modified task Jacobians and relaxed barrier functions for self-collision avoidance. The approach was validated on Apptronik's Astro hardware by demonstrating manipulation capabilities on a table-top environment with pickand-place box packing and a two-handed box pick up and handover task. I. INTRODUCTION Despite advances in robot autonomy, teleoperation [1], [2], [3] remains a practical approach for remote surveying Four 6 DoF trackers (headset, left controller, right controller, waist tracker) and the set of joints they control on the robot. A core problem with direct teleoperation is retargeting human-to-robot movements, which is an active area of research Finally, during direct teleoperation, it can be burdening [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14].