Extended Reality in Robotics [From the Guest Editors]

Extended reality (XR), which combines the real and virtual worlds, is greatly enhancing interaction possibilities between robots and humans, leading to a paradigm shift where the two entities can intuitively cooperate to perform shared-target tasks. Many XR devices are essentially performing the same spatial perception tasks as mobile robots (e.g., visual simultaneous localization and mapping), and thus XR provides an opportunity for robots and the humans using these devices to colocalize through a common understanding of their space, which also enables easier human-robot interactions.