A modular architecture for an interactive real-time simulation and training environment for satellite on-orbit servicing

Wolff, Robin; Preusche, Carsten; Gerndt, Andreas

doi:10.1057/jos.2013.10

Cited by 10 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…This section reports some key performance values that are more thoroughly discussed in [14] and presents the results of a pilot user study that was carried out for evaluating the system usability.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our framework addresses this with a number of mechanisms for reducing latency and maintaining consistency across the distributed simulations. These include advanced message queuing, separation between reliable, and non-reliable messages and lowoverhead communication protocols, as detailed in [14]. We report the end-to-end latency for transmitting synchronization messages across the distributed simulation system in Section 6.…”

Section: The Interactive Virtual Reality Environmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A more detailed discussion of the latency measurements of the distributed system can be found in [14].…”

Section: Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

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VR-OOS: The DLR's virtual reality simulator for telerobotic on-orbit servicing with haptic feedback

Sagardia

Hertkorn

Hulin

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE Aerospace Conference

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The growth of space debris is becoming a severe issue that urgently requires mitigation measures based on maintenance, repair, and de-orbiting technologies. Such on-orbit servicing (OOS) missions, however, are delicate and expensive. Virtual Reality (VR) enables the simulation and training in a flexible and safe environment, and hence has the potential to drastically reduce costs and time, while increasing the success rate of future OOS missions. This paper presents a highly immersive VR system with which satellite maintenance procedures can be simulated interactively using visual and haptic feedback. The system can be used for verification and training purposes for human and robot systems interacting in space. Our framework combines unique realistic virtual reality simulation engines with advanced immersive interaction devices. The DLR bimanual haptic device HUG is used as the main user interface. The HUG is equipped with two light-weight robot arms and is able to provide realistic haptic feedback on both human arms. Additional devices provide vibrotactile and electrotactile feedback at the elbow and the fingertips. A particularity of the realtime simulation is the fusion of the Bullet physics engine with our haptic rendering algorithm, which is an enhanced version of the Voxmap-Pointshell Algorithm. Our haptic rendering engine supports multiple objects in the scene and is able to compute collisions for each of them within 1 msec, enabling realistic virtual manipulation tasks even for stiff collision configurations. The visualization engine ViSTA is used during the simulation to achieve photo-realistic effects, increasing the immersion. In order to provide a realistic experience at interactive frame rates, we developed a distributed system architecture, where the load of computing the physics simulation, haptic feedback and visualization of a complex scene is transferred to dedicated machines. The implementations are presented in detail and the performance of the overall system is validated. Additionally, a preliminary user study in which the virtual system is compared to a physical test bed shows the suitability of the VR-OOS framework.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Interactive Virtual Reality Environmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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VR-OOS: The DLR's virtual reality simulator for telerobotic on-orbit servicing with haptic feedback

Sagardia

Hertkorn

Hulin

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE Aerospace Conference

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“…The test scene was defined using the COLLADA file format which was read by our VR software framework [27] running on the visualization cluster. It provided real-time rendering and interfaces to interaction devices of the VR display system.…”

Section: Hard-and Softwarementioning

confidence: 99%

An evaluation of two simple methods for representing heaviness in immersive virtual environments

Hummel

Dodiya

Wolff

et al. 2013

2013 IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces (3DUI)

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Weight perception in virtual environments generally can be achieved with haptic devices. However, most of these are hard to integrate in an immersive virtual environment (IVE) due to their technical complexity and the restriction of a user's movement within the IVE. We describe two simple methods using only a wireless light-weight finger-tracking device in combination with a physics simulated hand model to create a feeling of heaviness of virtual objects when interacting with them in an IVE. The first method maps the varying distance between tracked fingers and the thumb to the grasping force required for lifting a virtual object with a given weight. The second method maps the detected intensity of finger pinch during grasping gestures to the lifting force. In an experiment described in this paper we investigated the potential of the proposed methods for the discrimination of heaviness of virtual objects by finding the just noticeable difference (JND) to calculate the Weber fraction. Furthermore, the workload that users experienced using these methods was measured to gain more insight into their usefulness as interaction technique.At a hit ratio of 0.75, the determined Weber fraction using the finger distance based method was 16.25% and using the pinch based method was 15.48%, which corresponds to values found in related work. There was no significant effect of method on the difference threshold measured and the workload experienced, however the user preference was higher for the pinch based method. The results demonstrate the capability of the proposed methods for the perception of heaviness in IVEs and therefore represent a simple alternative to haptics based methods.

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“…The work presented in this paper was mainly driven by an ongoing project called VR-OOS (Virtual Reality for On-Orbit Servicing) [1]. Its goal is to develop an interactive application for the planning, training and analysis of on-orbit servicing tasks within a haptic enabled virtual reality environment used to train astronauts but also robot control.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Evaluation of Open Source Physics Engines for Use in Virtual Reality Assembly Simulations

Hummel

Wolff

Stein

et al. 2012

Advances in Visual Computing

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We present a comparison of five freely available physics engines with specific focus on robotic assembly simulation in virtual reality (VR) environments. The aim was to evaluate the engines with generic settings and minimum parameter tweaking. Our benchmarks consider the minimum collision detection time for a large number of objects, restitution characteristics, as well as constraint reliability and body interpenetration. A further benchmark tests the simulation of a screw and nut mechanism made of rigid-bodies only, without any analytic approximation. Our results show large deviations across the tested engines and reveal benefits and disadvantages that help in selecting the appropriate physics engine for assembly simulations in VR.

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A modular architecture for an interactive real-time simulation and training environment for satellite on-orbit servicing

Cited by 10 publications

References 15 publications

VR-OOS: The DLR's virtual reality simulator for telerobotic on-orbit servicing with haptic feedback

VR-OOS: The DLR's virtual reality simulator for telerobotic on-orbit servicing with haptic feedback

An evaluation of two simple methods for representing heaviness in immersive virtual environments

An Evaluation of Open Source Physics Engines for Use in Virtual Reality Assembly Simulations

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