Prototyping of Immersive HRI Scenarios
Human-Centric Robotics, page 537-544 - sep 2017
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 Unied 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.
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BibTex references
@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" }