  Robots assist in many areas that are considered unsafe for humans to operate.
For instance, in handling pandemic diseases such as the recent Covid-19
outbreak and other outbreaks like Ebola, robots can assist in reaching areas
dangerous for humans and do simple tasks such as pick up the correct medicine
(among a set of bottles prescribed) and deliver to patients. In such cases, it
might not be good to rely on the fully autonomous operation of robots. Since
many mobile robots are fully functional with low-level tasks such as grabbing
and moving, we consider the mixed-initiative control where the user can guide
the robot remotely to finish such tasks. For this mixed-initiative control, the
user controlling the robot needs to visualize a 3D scene as seen by the robot
and guide it. Mixed reality can virtualize reality and immerse users in the 3D
scene that is reconstructed from the real-world environment. This technique
provides the user more freedom such as choosing viewpoints at view time. In
recent years, benefiting from the high-quality data from Light Detection and
Ranging (LIDAR) and RGBD cameras, mixed reality is widely used to build
networked platforms to improve the performance of robot teleoperations and
robot-human collaboration, and enhanced feedback for mixed-initiative control.
In this paper, we proposed a novel haptic-enabled mixed reality system, that
provides haptic interfaces to interact with the virtualized environments and
give remote guidance for mobile robots towards high-level tasks. The
experimental results show the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed
haptic enabled mixed reality system.
