An Immersive Virtual Robotics Environment based on ROS

From Kel Guerin at Johns Hopkins University

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At the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics at Johns Hopkins University, we have utilized the extensive visualization tools available in ROS to create an immersive virtual reality environment for interacting with robots. The versatile plug-in system for the RVIZ visualization package has allowed us to create virtual user interfaces, information displays, and interactive objects that co-exist with other resources in the RVIZ environment. Additionally, the excellent Oculus Rift RVIZ plugin gave us the perfect starting point for using RVIZ as a VR environment. This provides us an excellent test-bed for virtually teleoperating an teleprogramming our robots. Finally, the flexibility of ROS lets us deploy IVRE on several robots in our lab, including industrial systems and surgical robots. For more information on the tools we used, checkout the oculus rviz plugin and the RVIZ plugin API.