Hello ROS Community,
My company is working on an Augmented-Reality HRI platform. It’s still the early days of the project and I’d like to ask for your general feedback and ideas for features you’d find most interesting and useful.
My own background is not in robotics, I spent the past 7 years in the AR industry, exploring all the technical depths, limitations and possibilities of this medium. I believe it’s been so far pretty underutilized in robotics but also think there’s a great potential for some very interesting applications (but it’s not as simple as plugging HoloLens to something). My initial focus is on what the human operator might find useful and what spatial computing in the cloud could add to all this, but I bet you may have different ideas. I made a simulation explaining my reasoning and what this might look like, this is by far not a complete list. I also realize the presented interaction model only makes sense in certain situations. It’s all a process and I’m trying to learn more about what you guys think about all this.
The AR interface and the Cloud backend are pretty much done and ready to be used in real-life scenarios and commercial projects. The plan is to implement the robot interface as a ROS package and inject messages into the path plannings and controls subsystems.
You may know that this area (AR HRI) has been subject of academic research for some time now. I’ve read several papers exploring various discrete applications, things such as visualization of robot’s intent, path planning, debugging, visual programming and so on. My question is - what would you find most useful?
Assume you put on some sort of affordable AR/MR HMD and your ROS packages can send messages through this whole stack, for instance to display some useful 3D graphic in the coordinate system of your robot. It will be displayed accurately, you can update it in real-time, and don’t need to worry about this whole AR part, it will just work. The person wearing the HMD on the other end can also send commands to your robot. All this should be highly customizable and ready to be used regardless of hardware.
Any ideas or feedback would be highly appreciated at this stage. Be honest with me, I can handle it 