Abstract

Immersive teleoperation of quadruped robots requires the operator to interpret a remote environment, make decisions, and maintain control over a dynamic platform through mediated visual feedback and networked command transmission. This study presents and validates a reproducible augmented reality (AR)–ROS 2 architecture designed to analyze the relationship between system-level technical conditions and operator experience during immersive teleoperation of a physical quadruped robot. The system integrates Meta Quest 3, Unity, UDP communication, ROS 2 middleware, and Xiaomi CyberDog within a modular workflow that jointly supports immersive control, live RGB/depth perception, physical robot execution, and user-centered HRI evaluation. The architecture decouples command transmission and visual feedback into two UDP-based channels: the control channel maps virtual joysticks and discrete HUD buttons to ROS 2 locomotion and action commands, while the perception channel transmits compressed RGB and depth frames for display in the AR interface. Under nominal conditions, the control channel achieved a mean end-to-end latency of 9.37 ms, a P95 of 18.45 ms, an effective update frequency close to 18 Hz, and 100% packet reception. Compared with ROS-TCP-Endpoint, the proposed UDP bridge showed similar latency but higher flow integrity, avoiding duplicate, parsing, and dropped-command events. The visual channel achieved mean end-to-end latencies of 21.09 ms for RGB and 26.99 ms for depth, with frame reception rates of 91.78% and 91.10%, respectively, under a shared 18.67 Mbps mobile network. A complementary network degradation analysis showed that the control channel remained operational under bandwidth reduction, packet loss, added latency, combined degradation, and physical separation of the robot. The user evaluation with 25 participants yielded a corrected Raw NASA-TLX score of 7.13±4.10, a positive perceived performance score of 95.20±5.10, and a System Usability Scale score of 90.30±6.63, indicating low perceived workload and high usability. These results show that low end-to-end latency, high flow integrity, and stable visual feedback were accompanied by low perceived workload and high usability, indicating that the technical temporal response, stability, and robustness of the communication channels are consistent with an effective and low-demand operator experience during AR-based teleoperation of a physical quadruped robot.

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