Comparison and Analysis of Human Comfort in Virtual Reality (VR)-based and Reality-based Human-Robot Collaboration Tasks

Virtual Reality (VR) has been used in robotics fields due to its convenience and cost-efficiency compared to actual reality. Whether the VR application can truly simulate the actual reality and offer a similar immersive experience has always been a research question. Most existing studies mainly focus on the usability of VR compared to actual reality. In addition to usability, whether VR can reproduce the human comfort feeling, which is different from VR motion sickness but instead the comfort while interacting with a virtual robot compared to a real robot, still remains unanswered. Therefore, this paper aims to explore this issue with a focus on human comfort through experimental studies in both VR-based and reality-based human-robot collaborations. The experiments require human subjects to collaborate with a real Yumi robot with a VR-based virtual Yumi robot to accomplish a series of tasks. A comprehensive analysis of the results is performed, including the effectiveness of the VR in reproducing human comfort feeling and the cases when VR could not do it well.