Towards the Development of Telepresence Applications with TIAGo and TIAGo++ Using a Virtual Reality Headset

TIAGo and TIAGo++ have proved to be valuable robotic platforms for human-robot interaction and assistance-oriented scenarios, among others. Their single and dual manipulation capabilities combined with a careful choice of peripherals and the open-source Robot Operating System (ROS) middleware framework make them well suited for teleoperation tasks. By fully leveraging TIAGo's integrated sensors and through the programming of a virtual reality application for the Meta Quest 2 headset through the Unity3D engine, this work aims to pave the way for telepresence tasks. A software architecture is presented and implemented using tools developed by the open source community. A kinematic study is conducted to determine the Denavit-Hartenberg parameters of TIAGo's arm, and it is translated to the product of exponentials formalism used in the field of screw theory. Inverse kinematics is solved using the latter, accounting for the challenges a redundant chain poses. Trajectory smoothing using B-splines is explored. The application was tested in the Gazebo simulator and on the real robots.