Pan-Tilt-Roll Televisualization with Adjustable Baseline Stereo
Published in 2nd Workshop Toward Robot Avatars, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023
Recommended citation: Naughton, P., Nam, J. S., Marques, J. M. C., Peng, J.C., Zhu, Y., Kong, Q., Hauser, K. (2023). "Pan-Tilt-Roll Televisualization with Adjustable Baseline Stereo". In 2nd Workshop Toward Robot Avatars, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation ICRA https://www.ais.uni-bonn.de/ICRA2023AvatarWS/contributions/ICRA_2023_Avatar_WS_Naughton.pdf
Depth perception plays an important role in teleoperated task completion. Most previous works on teleoperated depth perception with Head Mounted Displays had focused their attention on matching the user’s Intra-Pupillary Distance (IPD) on the HMD’s displays, but used fixed stereo cameras on the robot side to capture the environment. In this workshop paper, we developed a custom adjustable baseline stereo rig for use in teleoperated robotics and show, through a small user study (n=16), that matching the robot’s stereo baseline with the user’s IPD has a small, but significant effect in task completion time for depth-critical operations. This suggests that future Avatar design could benefit from robot-side IPD adjustment devices, especially for fine manipulation tasks. We also observed that scaling the number of Degrees of Freedom on an avatar’s neck showed diminishing returns after 2 DoFs, hinting that commercial pan-tilt units might be sufficient for most avatar applications, though more research is needed with a more diverse task set.