“Augmented Reality for Robotics: A Review” authored by PhD Student Zhanat Makhataeva and Prof. Huseyin Atakan Varol was recently published in the journal MDPI Robotics. 

Augmented reality (AR) is used to enhance the perception of the real world by integrating virtual objects to an image sequence acquired from various camera technologies. The paper provides an overview of AR research in robotics during the five year period from 2015 to 2019. Selected papers were classified based on application areas into four categories: 1) Medical robotics: Robot-Assisted surgery (RAS), prosthetics, rehabilitation, and training systems; 2) Motion planning and control: trajectory generation, robot programming, simulation, and manipulation; 3) Human-robot interaction (HRI): teleoperation, collaborative interfaces, wearable robots, haptic interfaces, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), and gaming; 4) Multi-agent systems: use of visual feedback to remotely control drones, robot swarms, and robots with shared workspace. Also, recent developments in AR technology are discussed followed by the challenges met in AR due to issues of camera localization, environment mapping, and registration. AR applications were explored in terms of how AR was integrated and which improvements it introduced to corresponding fields of robotics. In addition major limitations of the presented applications in each category were summarized. Finally, review concludes with future directions of AR research in robotics. The survey covers over 100 research works published over the last five years.