V-TX: A VR-Based Deployment and Evaluation System for Wearable Telexistence Robotic Systems

Wearable telexistence robotic systems have risen in prominence after the COVID-19 pandemic, being vital for various applications. However, their design, fabrication, and evaluation require substantial resources and are unsupported by robot simulation systems. Therefore, we present V-TX, which is a VR-based system for deploying and evaluating wearable telexistence systems. V-TX extends key telexistence systems' components with versatility for customizing different attributes based on the intended application. To demonstrate the potential of V-TX, we replicated a real telexistence robot in V-TX, called Piton, and showed a novel potential use for exploring and evaluating different robot designs, interaction methods, and deployments. We conducted a comparative evaluation between the real Piton robot and its V-TX implementation. The results show that V-TX gave results that match those of the real counterpart across the main factors of telexistence, indicating its viability as an alternative to traditional evaluation approaches using real robots. Lastly, we discuss the limitations and present future research directions.