A VR System for Immersive Teleoperation and Live Exploration with a Mobile Robot Applications like disaster management and industrial inspection often require experts to enter contaminated places. To circumvent the need for physical presence, it is desirable to generate a fully immersive individual live teleoperation experience. However, standard videobased approaches suffer from a limited degree of immersion and situation awareness due to the restriction to the camera view, which impacts the navigation. In this paper, we present a novel VRbased practical system for immersive robot teleoperation and scene exploration. While being operated through the scene, a robot captures RGBD data that is streamed to a SLAMbased live multiclient telepresence system. Here, a global 3D model of the already captured scene parts is reconstructed and streamed to the individual remote user clients where the rendering for e.g. headmounted display devices (HMDs) is performed. We introduce a novel lightweight robot client component which transmits robotspecific data and enables a quick integration into existing robotic systems. This way, in contrast to first person exploration systems, the operators can explore and navigate in the remote site completely independent of the current position and view of the capturing robot, complementing traditional input devices for teleoperation. We provide a proofofconcept implementation and demonstrate the capabilities as well as the performance of our system regarding interactive object measurements and bandwidthefficient data streaming and visualization. Furthermore, we show its benefits over purely videobased teleoperation in a user study revealing a higher degree of situation awareness and a more precise navigation in challenging environments.

Towards a Virtual Reality Interface for Remote Robotic Teleoperation Intuitive interaction is the cornerstone of efficient and effective task execution in remote robotic teleoperation. It requires highfidelity in control actions as well as perception (vision, haptic, and sensory feedback) from the remote environment. This paper presents Vicarios, a VRbased teleoperation interface with the aim of facilitating intuitive realtime remote teleoperation, while utilizing the inherent benefits of VR, including immersive visualization, freedom of viewpoint selection, and fluidity of interaction through natural action interfaces. The overall architecture of Vicarios is described, with its components and framework. A preliminary comparative user study, with a realworld telemanipulation task, was conducted to quantify the effectiveness of Vicarios. It is shown that the VRbased interface is easytouse and learn, with an overall learning rate of 0.93 sec. per trial for the users. The smoothness metric shows that the users can improve on their task performance over time as well. Vicarios allows the intuitiveness and flexibility to maintain efficiency in telerobotic tasks. It forms the basis for an immersive perception interface in remote robotic teleoperation.