Augmented Reality for Robotics: A Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper provided a survey covers over 100 published AR research works in robotics field during the 5 years. These works were classified into four categories: Medical robotics, Motion planning and control, Human-robot interaction, and Multi-agent systems.

The survey is quite comprehensive. It explored AR applications in terms of how AR was integrated, and it summarized the major limitations of the presented applications in each category.

Therefore, I suggest to accept the paper.

Author Response

We appreciate the positive comments of the Reviewer 1. In response to the comment “Moderate English changes required”, the paper was proofread by a native speaker of English and revised accordingly.

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors present a review of recent works were augmented reality is used to support robotics applications. The authors do a great job in presenting the many open research areas in the crossing of these two technologies, presenting both their achievements and the main shortcomings.

The paper is well written and presented. Even though the complexity of the topic make it difficult to define a completely clear underlying structure, the authors do a commendable effort in structuring the many works presented.

Author Response

We appreciate the positive comments of the Reviewer 2. In response to the comment “minor spell check required”, the paper was proofread by a native speaker of English and revised accordingly.

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper proposes a very interestin review of the state-of-the-art in the applications of Augmented Reality in Robotics.

Authors have made a very interesting and hard work to summarize all the findings included in the paper, and the result is absolutely worth publishing in the journal.

Anyway, there are a few issues to improve before publishing:

• The introduction is too large. It start with interesting explanations of the key terms and context of the study. But unfortunately, the it includes too many  details on specific solutions that are not necessary in a "first sight" as the Introduction of the paper. So I recommend moving the details on specific solutions to the chapters 2 or 3. The general findings of the previous surveys commented are interesting, but the details are better in other sections.
• Informacion on figure 1 could improve incluind acronyms of each term
• Information on figure 2 is interesting, but using a chart with one line for each keyword could improve reading.
• Additionally, the information in fogure 2 could be later refined by topic: offering a chart with the results of the search of the three term in the context of "Medical robotics", "Robots control and planning", "Human-robot interaction" and "swarm robotics" in each section
• A key issue is the reproducibility in the paper: how did the authors chose the papers listed in tables 1, 2 and 3? Probably they made a search of different key terms in different scientific repositories. Which terms? In which repositories? This is a very important issue. I understand that the intention was not to make a more formal "Systematic literature review", but at leat the minimum information to know the reason for including papers in the study have to be included and discussed
• The last column in tables 1,2,3 and 4 could be better renamed as limitations, issues or future work better than "problems"
• Last of all I'd invite the authors to use a public data repository like figshare to upload the bulk results of their study so reader could dowload them

Author Response

We thank Reviewer 3 for the valuable and constructive comments.

In order to shorten the Introduction, we removed three paragraphs from the Introduction and placed them to Sections 2 and 3. Another paragraph was shifted to the History of AR section, and two paragraphs were shifted to the AR Technology section. After performing these revisions, the clarity of the Introduction improved significantly.

We also modified Figures 1 and 2 according to the suggestion of the reviewer. We added acronyms of the presented concepts in Figure 1 and changed the bar chart style into the single line style for three areas, MR, AR and VR in Figure 2. In addition, using the same style of Figure 2,  we created four new figures, each representing distribution of papers in MR, AR and VR within each of the considered areas of robotics, such as Medical Robotics, Robot Control and Planning, Human-Robot Interaction and Swarm Robotics. We added new figures to each of the sections describing different applications of AR within different fields of robotics. Also, we added one paragraph at the end of each section describing these new figures and short discussion of how we selected the papers, and which keywords were used for the queries to the Scopus Database. 

The reviewer asked us to clarify the paper selection process for the Tables 1-4. Specifically, we were asked to add information about which repository and which keywords were utilized for paper collection and paper identification. For each of the sections on AR applications, we added one paragraph describing the paper selection process. We explicitly defined which keywords and terms we applied for the search queries from Scopus Database for finding relevant papers. Among the papers listed as the output of the Scopus search, we clearly state that we did not consider papers that do not suit the scope of our work. As a result, we ended up with around 100 papers considered  in our review paper.

We also renamed the last column of Tables 1-4 to “Limitations” as suggested by the reviewer.