ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Virtual Real.
Sec. Haptics
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frvir.2025.1648019
Safety for Mobile Encountered-Type Haptic Devices in Large-Scale Virtual Reality
Provisionally accepted
- Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria
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Mobile robots are becoming more common in Virtual Reality applications, especially for delivering physical interactions through Encountered-Type Haptic Devices (ETHD). However, current safety standards and definitions of collaborative robots (Cobots) do not sufficiently address situations where an immersed user shares the workspace and interacts with a mobile robot without seeing it. In this paper, we explore the specific safety challenges of using mobile platforms for ETHDs in a large-scale immersive setup. We review existing robotic safety standards and perform a risk assessment of our immersive autonomous mobile ETHD system CoboDeck. We demonstrate a structured approach for potential risk identification and mitigation via a set of hardware and software safety measures. These include strategies for robot behavior, such as pre-emptive repositioning and active collision avoidance, as well as fallback mechanisms. We suggest a simulation-based testing framework that allows evaluating the safety measures systematically before involving human subjects. Based on that, we examine the impact of different proposed safety strategies on the number of collisions, robot movement, haptic feedback rendering, and noise resilience. Our results show considerably improved safety and robustness with our suggested approach.
Keywords: virtual reality, mobile robots, Safety, haptics, Interaction
Received: 16 Jun 2025; Accepted: 26 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mortezapoor, Ghazanfari, Vasylevska, Vonach and Kaufmann. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Soroosh Mortezapoor, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria
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