Immersive Interfaces and Field Robotics

Dear Colleagues,

Robots were once primarily limited to highly controlled industrial environments, but today, robotic systems continually evolve to become autonomous entities that must deal with uncertain and unstructured environments. In field robotics, for example, this evolution requires new fundamentals that can enable robots to deal with unstructured and unexplored environments. Since these new robots are deployed to perform semi-autonomous tasks with remote control, it is important to use efficient human–machine interfaces that allow users to communicate and interact with robots in a fluid way and provide operators with remote information of the environment that facilitates knowledge of the situation. In addition to the most used modalities (for example, speech and gestures), mixed reality (MR) (a combination of virtual reality and augmented reality) has introduced the possibility of superimposing virtual elements on real-world scenes, thus providing a new mechanism to visualize reality and information acquired or determined by the robot (for example, maps, planned movements and behaviors, etc.). With MR, human operators can better understand the environment in which robots must develop their mission and the actions they must perform, facilitating the development of remote missions in complex environments.

This Special Issue aims to compile the advances in which virtual reality, augmented reality or their combination are used to remotely monitor and control the tasks of field robotics, both in their interventions in terrestrial, aerial, or aquatic environments, to carry out missions of inspection, intervention, search and rescue, environmental monitoring, agriculture, etc.

We await your contributions with original articles, especially those that show practical realizations in outdoor environments.

Prof. Dr. Antonio Barrientos
Dr. Juan D. Hernández Vega
Guest Editors

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• field robotics
• mixed reality
• virtual reality and augmented reality
• human–machine interfaces
• remote operated robot
• situational awareness
• immersive interfaces