Intuitive and immersive teleoperation of robot manipulators for remote decontamination

Worker safety is one of the most important aspects of decontamination tasks in hazardous environments. This motivates the development of (semi-) autonomous robotic systems that can be teleoperated from a safe distance using simple commands such as 'move the manipulator over there and grab'. In this paper, we introduce a new control station concept called Digital Twin Control System aimed at robots with manipulator arms. It consists of three components: (1) A unified communication interface that abstracts the remote robot's functionalities into easy-to-use interaction modes, (2) an immersive visualization and assistant system to operate the interface, and (3) a haptic rendering system that can simulate arbitrary robot arms. We demonstrate how the proposed system can be used by untrained operators to pick up contaminated objects remotely in a test scenario.