SwarmFlowVR: A Virtual Reality User Interface for Multi-Robot Control

Intuitive control of multi-robot systems is an important feature of many applications requiring operator input. Accordingly, this work proposes a virtual reality (VR) user interface for easy, intuitive teleoperation of a team of mobile robots using point-and-click waypoint commands. The robots considered in this work are 4-wheeled mobile robots, and the proposed VR user interface, called SwarmFlowVR, was developed in Unity and deployed on a Meta Oculus Quest VR headset. SwarmFlowVR presents options to issue single or multiple commands to one or several robots simultaneously without requiring operator line of sight to the robots. To evaluate the effectiveness of SwarmFlowVR, a user study was conducted with 20 individuals, self-reporting a variety of levels of prior experience with virtual reality and mobile robot control. Among other results, 95% of users reported that SwarmFlowVR enabled effective control of both individual robots and multiple robots simultaneously. Our results indicate that SwarmFlowVR presents a promising user interface for the intuitive teleoperation of multiple mobile robots, accessible even to users with no prior experience in VR and/or robotics.