A virtual reality-based immersive teleoperation system for remote human-robot collaborative manufacturing

In recent years, the cutting-edge technologies in smart manufacturing have presented promising opportunities for the utilization of human-robot collaborative teleoperation in personalized manufacturing tasks. To effectively leverage the creative capabilities of humans while benefiting from the efficiency and stability of robots, the provision of an intuitive teleoperation interface assumes paramount importance. However, current teleoperation systems still face limitations in terms of intuitive operability. In this study, we present a virtual reality- based teleoperation system that offers operators a more intuitive interaction platform for robot control, thereby facilitating personalized manufacturing processes. The overall system framework design, as well as the main components are elaborated in detail. Furthermore, an evaluative case study based on the battery disassembly task is conducted to assess the performance of the proposed system. The results demonstrate that the proposed teleoperation system exhibits improved intuitiveness. (c) 2024 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0)