An Augmented Reality Interface for Teleoperating Robot Manipulators: Reducing Demonstrator Task Load through Digital Twin Control

Acquiring high-quality demonstration data is essential for the success of data-driven methods, such as imitation learning. Existing platforms for providing demonstrations for manipulation tasks often impose significant physical and mental demands on the demonstrator, require additional hardware systems, or necessitate specialized domain knowledge. In this work, we present a novel augmented reality (AR) interface for teleoperating robotic manipulators, emphasizing the demonstrator's experience, particularly in the context of performing complex tasks that require precision and accuracy. This interface, designed for the Microsoft HoloLens 2, leverages the adaptable nature of mixed reality (MR), enabling users to control a physical robot through digital twin surrogates. We assess the effectiveness of our approach across three complex manipulation tasks and compare its performance against OPEN TEACH, a recent virtual reality (VR) teleoperation system, as well as two traditional control methods: kinesthetic teaching and a 3D SpaceMouse for end-effector control. Our findings show that our method performs comparably to the VR approach and demonstrates the potential for AR in data collection. Additionally, we conduct a pilot study to evaluate the usability and task load associated with each method. Results indicate that our AR-based system achieves higher usability scores than the VR benchmark and significantly reduces mental demand, physical effort, and frustration experienced by users. An accompanying video can be found at https://youtu.be/w-M58ohPgrA.