Human-guided robot 3D mapping using virtual reality technology

Map building is a fundamental task in many robotic applications. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for 3D mapping of indoor environments which allows a robot avatar to collaborate with a human seamlessly through a virtual reality (VR) device. The 3D map is created using the 3D data from an RGB-D camera mounted on the robot and simultaneously transmitted to a remote server, and then rendered to the VR device. On the other hand, the intentions of the user are inferred using the motion of the head movement based on hidden Markov models (HMMs), and then interpreted into commands to control the robot. We implement the proposed approach based on a modified Pioneer robot platform. The experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed system.