Prototyping of Immersive HRI Scenarios

This paper introduces an open-source software toolkit for combining the Robot Operating System (ROS) and Unity3D to versatile robotic applications involving virtual environments. Despite the availability of high-quality robot control and simulation systems like ROS, there is still no framework available for designing complex human-robot interaction tasks and making use of Virtual Reality without expert knowledge in robotics and ROS. Virtual Reality, especially involving head-mounted displays as well as various input and feedback devices can increase the experienced sensation, improve the understanding of certain 3D scenes or provide a test environment for the training of non-expert operators. As a solution, we propose Unity3D for designing the interaction interface to virtual and real robots. Our implementation of the bilateral communication layer between Unity3D and the ROSbridge and the importer for XML-based les in Unied Robot Description Format allows synchronizing the state of the real robot and the one of its simulated counterpart in the Unity3D environment in a very comfortable way. Using the proposed system we present different use cases and demonstrate how to prototype dierent interaction concepts eciently.

@InProceedings{KSESZ17,
  author       = "Krupke, Dennis and Starke, Sebastian and Einig, Lasse and Steinicke, Frank and Zhang, Jianwei",
  title        = "Prototyping of Immersive HRI Scenarios",
  booktitle    = "Human-Centric Robotics",
  series       = "Proceedings of  CLAWAR 2017: 20th International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots and the Support Technologies for Mobile Machines",
  pages        = "537-544",
  month        = "sep",
  year         = "2017",
  editor       = "Manual F. Silva, Gurvinder S. Virk, Mohammad O. Tokhi, Benedita Malheiro, Pedro Guedes and Paulo Ferreira",
  publisher    = "World Scientific",
  organization = "CLAWAR Association",
  url          = "http://basilic.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/Publications/2017/KSESZ17"
}