Qualitative assessment of an immersive teleoperation environment for collaborative professional activities in a "beaming" experiment

Guillermo Gomez (1) , Carole Plasson (1) , Frédéric Elisei (2, 1) , Frédéric Noël (3) , Gérard Bailly (1)

1 GIPSA-CRISSP - GIPSA - Cognitive Robotics, Interactive Systems, & Speech Processing
2 GIPSA-Services - GIPSA-Services
3 G-SCOP_CC - Conception collaborative

The current study assesses an immersive teleoperation platform for professional collaborative activities. Thisplatform uses an iCub robot and virtual-reality hardware (VR headset and motion capture) to elicit an embodimentsituation, where the pilot collaborates with remote actors through the robot ("beaming platform"): through therobot, the pilot can act and perceive using his natural affordances (head moving, vision and hearing) that aremapped to/from the robot effectors/sensors. One challenge is to measure how the robot expression capacity levelcan modulate the efficiency of the participation of the remote pilot with his collaborators. An experience wherethe pilot trains two subjects to assemble a mechanical system was organised: we observed the capacity of the twosubjects to realize the task they discover and to collaborate with the pilot, with a more or less expressive robot.This experience clearly highlighted the importance of embodiment and the opportunities opened by beamingplatforms, allowing the enhancement of the physical space by agents:i.e. social robots or conversational agents.

Keywords: Teleoperation; Humanoid Robot; Beaming; Immersion

Domains: Graphics [cs.GR]; Human-Computer Interaction [cs.HC]

Guillermo Gomez, Carole Plasson, Frédéric Elisei, Frédéric Noël, Gérard Bailly. Qualitative assessment of an immersive teleoperation environment for collaborative professional activities in a "beaming" experiment. EuroVR 2015 - European conference for Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, Oct 2015, Milan, Italy. 8 p. ⟨hal-01228890⟩