# Virtual Reality-Based Interface for Advanced Assisted Mobile Robot Teleoperation
## 1 Introduction
### Literature Review  
The main object of this work is the teleoperation of robotic systems, in general, and mobile robots, in particular. The teleoperation or remote control of robotic systems by humans has been deeply studied in the past decades [22] and is still an ongoing tendency in research. Robot teleoperation is carried out for many reasons: to operate in hazardous environments (e.g., radioactive zones [23; 24], aerial zones [25; 26], underwater areas [27; 28], or in space [29]); to conduct accurate surgeries [30; 31; 32; 33]; to perform rescue operations [34], etc. Recently, advanced artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have facilitated the automation of many complex operations that previously had to be conducted using robot teleoperation. Nevertheless, there are still many robot applications that cannot be completely automated due to their subjectivity or complexity. However, these partially automated tasks can significantly benefit from human-robot cooperation by means of shared-control architectures [35]. In this sense, many contributions have been developed focusing on the human-robot interaction in teleoperation tasks [36; 37; 38; 21; 39; 40; 41; 42], as is the case of this work. Telepresence [22] provides the user with an interface which makes the direct control task less dependent on his or her skills and concentration. Telepresence for direct control teleoperation is a strong trend in recent research developments due to the introduction of visual interfaces [30], virtual and augmented reality [39], haptic devices [43], or a combination of them [31; 40; 44]. For example, the authors in [22] provided the user with an interface which makes the direct control task less dependent on his or her skills and concentration. The authors in [37] proposed an approach where one arm of a bimanual robot is teleoperated to grasp a target object, while the other develops an automatic task of visual servoing to keep the object in sight of a camera and avoid occlusions, thus making the teleoperation easier. The success of telepresence lies directly upon the skills of the user who performs the teleoperation [9; 45]. For this reason, many current approaches propose to incorporate constraints to avoid the user commanding the robot in a wrong way. For instance, in [32] virtual fixtures (i.e., virtual barriers) were included to automatically modify the reference position provided by the user in order to confine it within the allowed area. In [24; 43], haptic devices were used to prevent the user from commanding reference positions beyond certain limits. However, assisted teleoperation with telepresence interfaces and virtual barriers is still an ongoing research field due to its drawbacks, since the control is still held by the human [36]. In this regard, this article proposes to use the well-known potential field-based navigation method together with virtual reality devices to improve the current assisted teleoperation of mobile robots. Virtual Reality-Based Interfaces  
Technical advances in the development of virtual environments (VE) and virtual reality (VR) headsets and devices for the video games industry [46; 47] or social media [48; 49] have now made it possible to develop applications related to human-robot interaction. In particular, in mobile robot applications, some interesting works using VR can be found. For instance, the authors in [9] proposed an VR interface for training operators, who teleoperated the movement of a mobile robot with two arms for industrial pick-and-place tasks, and tested it with several users to determine the improvement obtained. Authors in [50] provided an approach to reduce the effects of time delays during the teleoperation based on VR and optimization data techniques. Authors in [51] developed a VR simulator that recreated a team of selective compliance assembly arms (SCARA) to include cloud resources to help users to improve the task performance. Authors in [52] presented an immersive SLAM-based VR system for the teleoperation of mobile manipulators in unknown environments.