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

Abstract

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. In this paper, we investigate whether a minimalistic encoding of the reachability of a point near an object of interest, which we call REACHVOX, can aid the collaboration between a remote operator and a robotic arm in VR. Through a user study (n=20), we indicate the strength of the visualization relative to a point-based reachability check-up.

Media

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). REACHVOX is a visualization that can show global data, such as the areas that are reachable by the robot around the task area without visually cluttering the task space. Through this, the user controls the position and rotation of the engine, enabling her to align the engine efficiently. (b) A detailed view of the visualization around the welding area. 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.

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Teaser

Publication

Steffen Hauck, Diar Abdlkarim, John Dudley, Per Ola Kristensson, Eyal Ofek & Jens Grubert. ReachVox: Clutter-free Reachability Visualization for Robot Motion Planning in Virtual Reality. In Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium of Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) 2025, pp. 1471-1478. arxiv preprint | video | DOI