We address the problem of teleoperating an industrial robot manipulator via a commercially available Virtual Reality (VR) interface. Previous works on VR teleoperation for robot manipulators focus primarily on collaborative or research robot platforms (whose dynamics and constraints differ from industrial robot arms), or only address tasks where the robot's dynamics are not as important (e.g: pick and place tasks). We investigate the usage of commercially available VR interfaces for effectively teleoeprating industrial robot manipulators in a variety of contact-rich manipulation tasks. We find that applying standard practices for VR control of robot arms is challenging for industrial platforms because torque and velocity control is not exposed, and position control is mediated through a black-box controller. To mitigate these problems, we propose a simplified filtering approach to process command signals to enable operators to effectively teleoperate industrial robot arms with VR interfaces in dexterous manipulation tasks. We hope our findings will help robot practitioners implement and setup effective VR teleoperation interfaces for robot manipulators. The proposed method is demonstrated on a variety of contact-rich manipulation tasks which can also involve very precise movement of the robot during execution (videos can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhkCB9mOaBc)

翻译：针对通过商用虚拟现实（VR）界面远程操作工业机器人机械臂的问题，我们开展了研究。以往关于机器人机械臂VR遥操作的工作主要集中于协作型或研究型机器人平台（其动力学特性和约束条件与工业机器人臂存在差异），或仅处理机器人动力学特性要求较低的任务（例如拾取与放置任务）。我们研究了使用商用VR界面在各种高接触性操作任务中有效遥操作工业机器人机械臂的可行性。研究发现，由于工业平台不开放扭矩和速度控制接口，且位置控制通过黑箱控制器实现，因此标准VR机械臂控制方法在此类平台上难以应用。为解决这些问题，我们提出一种简化的滤波方法来处理指令信号，使操作员能通过VR界面在灵巧操作任务中有效遥操作工业机器人臂。希望我们的研究成果能帮助机器人实践者实现并搭建适用于机器人机械臂的有效VR遥操作界面。所提方法已在多种高接触性操作任务中得到验证，这些任务在执行过程中还可能涉及机器人毫米级精确运动（相关视频可访问https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhkCB9mOaBc）。