A. Hopp, D. Schulz, W. Burgard, A.B. Cremers, and D. Fellner
Virtual Reality Visualization of distributed Tele-Experiments
IEEE Industrial Electronics Conference (IECON)
Abstract
The increased costs of laboratory environments such as mobile robots
and the specialization of research groups increase the demand for
collaboration between different research groups. Although the
Internet can be regarded as the most important medium for cooperation
over large distances, it does not provide the necessary bandwidth for
the transmission of video-streams required for example during a
tele-experiment with a mobile robot. In this paper we present a
combination of a tele-experimentation environment for autonomous
mobile robots (RTL) with a minimal rendering toolkit for virtual
reality (MRT-VR). The RTL-system includes means for bridging
transmission gaps by using simulation techniques to predict the robots
actions and supports automatic viewpoint selection for virtual
cameras in the MRT-VR system. The MRT-VR allows the online
visualization of experiments in a virtual environment. MRT-VR
additionally supports natural navigation of the user through the 3D
virtual environment in various aspects. It includes a collision
detection to avoid that users get inside of objects such as walls or
cupboards and supports climbing of stairs. Additionally users can
select different view-points or even automatically follow the robot
during its operation. Finally it supports the synchronization of the
view-points for distributed observers. This paper demonstrates, that
by combining both techniques an improved visualization quality with
respect to the precision of the simulation and the ease of operation
of tele-operated systems is obtained.
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Bibtex
@InProceedings{Hop98Virtual,
author = {Hopp, A. and Schulz, D. and Burgard, W. and
Cremers, A.B. and Fellner, D.},
title = {Virtual Reality Visualization of
Distributed Tele-Experiments},
booktitle = "IEEE Industrial Electronics Conference (IECON)",
year = 1998
}