  In immersive humanoid robot teleoperation, there are three main shortcomings
that can alter the transparency of the visual feedback: the lag between the
motion of the operator's and robot's head due to network communication delays
or slow robot joint motion. This latency could cause a noticeable delay in the
visual feedback, which jeopardizes the embodiment quality, can cause dizziness,
and affects the interactivity resulting in operator frequent motion pauses for
the visual feedback to settle; (ii) the mismatch between the camera's and the
headset's field-of-views (FOV), the former having generally a lower FOV; and
(iii) a mismatch between human's and robot's range of motions of the neck, the
latter being also generally lower. In order to leverage these drawbacks, we
developed a decoupled viewpoint control solution for a humanoid platform which
allows visual feedback with low-latency and artificially increases the camera's
FOV range to match that of the operator's headset. Our novel solution uses SLAM
technology to enhance the visual feedback from a reconstructed mesh,
complementing the areas that are not covered by the visual feedback from the
robot. The visual feedback is presented as a point cloud in real-time to the
operator. As a result, the operator is fed with real-time vision from the
robot's head orientation by observing the pose of the point cloud. Balancing
this kind of awareness and immersion is important in virtual reality based
teleoperation, considering the safety and robustness of the control system. An
experiment shows the effectiveness of our solution.
