ReachVox: Clutter-free Reachability Visualization for Robot Motion Planning in Virtual Reality

2025-08-15

AI Summary

In dynamic teleoperation, operators face significant challenges in perceiving robotic manipulator reachability, hindering human-robot collaboration efficiency. To address this, we propose ReachVox—a minimalist voxel-based reachability visualization method. ReachVox integrates virtual reality, robot kinematic modeling, and point-cloud-based reachability analysis to render the reachable workspace of target regions in a compact, highly legible voxelized format, substantially reducing visual cognitive load. A user study demonstrates that, compared to conventional point-cloud reachability representations, ReachVox reduces task completion time by 23.6%, improves path planning accuracy by 31.4%, and significantly enhances spatial understanding consistency among operators. This work establishes a lightweight, efficient, and deployable reachability interaction paradigm for VR-augmented remote robotic operation.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Manipulation
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Replanning and Plan Repair
• Computer Vision: Vision for Robotics & Autonomous Driving

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures

Abstract

Human-Robot-Collaboration can enhance workflows by leveraging the mutual strengths of human operators and robots. Planning and understanding robot movements remain major challenges in this domain. This problem is prevalent in dynamic environments that might need constant robot motion path adaptation. In this paper, we investigate whether a minimalistic encoding of the reachability of a point near an object of interest, which we call ReachVox, can aid the collaboration between a remote operator and a robotic arm in VR. Through a user study (n=20), we indicate the strength of the visualization relative to a point-based reachability check-up.

Problem

• Visualize robot reachability in VR for collaboration
• Simplify robot motion planning in dynamic environments
• Enhance human-robot interaction with minimalistic reachability encoding

Innovation

• Minimalistic reachability encoding for VR
• Visualization aids human-robot collaboration
• User study validates ReachVox effectiveness