Unmanned Ground Vehicle with Virtual Reality Vision

Abstract

This paper aims to describe the design and implementation of an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) and a smart phone virtual reality (VR) head mounted display (HMD) which enables visual situation awareness by giving the rescue (USAR) applications (a contemporary research issue in SAR UGV). (iii) a novel feature of the design is the simultaneous video feeds which are sent to the operator station computer for object detection using the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) algorithm and 3-D model construction of the UGV's surrounding objects from 2-D images of these objects. The design was realized using a smart phone-based HMD, which captures head movements in real time using its inertial measurement unit (IMU) and transmits it to three motors mounted on a rover to provide the movement about three axes (pitch, yaw and roll). The operator controls the motors via the HMD or a gamepad. Three on-board cameras provide video feeds which are transmitted to the HMD and operator computer. A software performs object detection and builds a 3-D model from the captured 2-D images. The realistic design constraints were identified