# A Systematic Review of Virtual Reality Interfaces for Controlling and Interacting with Robots
## 2 Methodology  
To identify how virtual reality is being used in robot interfaces, we conducted a systematic review following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines [19]. Publications were collected from the following databases:  
* IEEE Xplore
* ACM Digital Library
* SAGE Publications
* Springer Link
* MDPI  
These databases were selected based on their proceedings and journals associated with robotics and their accessibility within the Northeastern University library network.  
We used the following search string to capture relevant papers:  
(\"virtual reality\" OR \"vr\") AND robot  
The search string was purposefully kept generic in order to capture as many relevant papers as possible. The search was done at the abstract level for all the listed databases, except for Springer Link, which did not provide the option to customize the search. We kept the search at only the abstract since we found that, in general, the relevant records contained these keywords there. This helped return only the most relevant records by eliminating records that briefly mentioned virtual reality and/or robots in passing and were not the primary focus. Since Springer Link did not allow for a custom search, we elected to utilize their built-in relevance sorter and only include the first hundred results. The one hundred results cutoff was selected by scanning record titles and identifying the likely relevant records. Almost all relevant record titles were within the first fifty results, but we doubled this number in order to catch additional potentially relevant works. This number was also on par with the number of records pulled from the other databases.  
Results were narrowed to ones published between 2016 through September 2020. We decided to only look at the past 4 years, since 2016 is the year when virtual reality started becoming widely available on the consumer level ([[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/01/15/what-to-expect-from-virtual-reality-in-2016/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/01/15/what-to-expect-from-virtual-reality-in-2016/)]([https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/01/15/what-to-expect-from-virtual-reality-in-2016/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/01/15/what-to-expect-from-virtual-reality-in-2016/))). Additionally, the language was restricted to English.  
In total, we collected 518 records for evaluation. Figure 1 shows the flow diagram of the screening process. Records were first filtered at the title/abstract level. Records that pertained to the areas of robot-assisted surgery, robot-assisted rehabilitation, robots being used as haptic devices for VR, or VR development environments being used as robot simulators were rejected. Records whose focus was not on both VR and robotics or were ancillary in nature were rejected as well. After the initial screening, we moved to a full-text screening. The purpose of this review was to specifically look at papers that utilized VR in robot interfaces. Therefore, papers involving other areas of VR and robots, such as using VR to help conduct human-robot interaction studies, were removed from consideration. Additionally, records were rejected at this level for either belonging into a previously rejected category or for not containing substantial results. We aimed to include as many relevant works as possible though for a complete and through review of the current research in VR robot interfaces. Furthermore, we consolidated records by the same author(s) of related work and only included the most recent record. After the full evaluation, a total of 41 records were identified to be included in this review. Appendix A contains a table briefly summarizing all the included papers.