Robotics: Flying a robot through a virtual reality helmet
Visiting a museum or monument, enjoy a sunset at the end of the world, all without leaving your home: this is what promises the platform developed at the University of Pennsylvania (USA) through its Remote mobile robot. With this system, a person with an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset can direct the camera filming the scene with a camera. The pilot thus has a subjective view immersive.
In the near future, the combined advances in robotics and virtual reality will result in multiple applications and novel applications. We think of extra-bodily experiences such as the lunar rover developed by students and researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in the US, and which aims to make available to the public exploration of the Moon person view .
In a more down to earth perspective, the combination of a virtual reality headset and a remote-controlled robot could help rescue teams assess with greater precision the conditions in areas difficult to access or hazardous, not to mention many military applications. And why not imagine that one day visit a museum or a monument to discover the other side of the world as if you were there?
It is precisely this kind of immersion that has sought to reproduce a team from the University of Pennsylvania (USA) with its Project Dora (Dexterous Roving Observational Automaton in English) which presents itself as a "teleoperated robotic platform immersive ". It is an associate Oculus Rift virtual reality headset to a remote-controlled robot whose head is equipped with two video cameras.
The person wearing the helmet somehow sees through the eyes of the robot, as if she was there. If this kind of technique is not new in itself, innovation lies in the freedom of movement offered by Dora. The system tracks the precise movements of the head in six degrees of freedom. The objective is to reach a level of immersion as the person has the impression of actually being there. The demonstration video published on Vimeo, shows that human and machine are virtually body.
Faithfully reproduce the movements of the head
The Oculus helmet detects both the orientation of the head with its inertial and position using infrared beacons. The information is transmitted to Arduino microcontrollers and Edison (manufactured by Intel) through which the robot reproduces the movements of the head. The cameras filmed the craft with a resolution of 976 x 582 pixels at 30 frames per second. The Oculus helmet could however support a higher quality.
The main technical challenge that had to be overcome was to minimize the latency that occurs between the time the person moves his head and when the video display helmet renders this action. Meanwhile, several steps must be conducted in a very short time: the computer receives information about the movement, treatment, capture of the corresponding video image and return to Oculus helmet. Currently, the system lags Dora latency of about 70 milliseconds. According Oculus, the acceptable minimum to guarantee the immersion and realism of virtual reality is 60 milliseconds. The difference is not huge, knowing that, in the case of Dora project, designers must, in addition, to deal with the speed of the wireless connection between the headset and the robot as well as the friction of moving parts . However, they believe they can optimize the system to reduce the gap.
Currently, the wireless connection between the operator and the robot is via radio link with a range up to 7 km. For commercial use, the system should be based on Wi-Fi networks or 4G cell type whose performance should be sufficient to avoid excessive latency, which is not necessarily easy. For now, Dora is primarily a proof of concept and the project team has not decided on a possible commercial project.
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