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Mixed Reality as Communication Medium for Human-Robot Collaboration

Humans engaged in collaborative activities are naturally able to convey their intentions to teammates through multi-modal communication, which is made up of explicit and implicit cues. Similarly, a more natural form of human-robot collaboration may be achieved by enabling robots to convey their intentions to human teammates via multiple communication channels. In this paper, we postulate that a better communication may take place should collaborative robots be able to anticipate their movements to human teammates in an intuitive way. In order to support such a claim, we propose a robot system's architecture through which robots can communicate planned motions to human teammates leveraging a Mixed Reality interface powered by modern head-mounted displays. Specifically, the robot's hologram, which is superimposed to the real robot in the human teammate's point of view, shows the robot's future movements, allowing the human to understand them in advance, and possibly react to them in an appropriate way. We conduct a preliminary user study to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed anticipatory visualization during a complex collaborative task. The experimental results suggest that an improved and more natural collaboration can be achieved by employing this anticipatory communication mode.