Standardization and Integration in Robotics: Case of Virtual Reality Tools

Robotics needs realistic simulators and environments to display not only physical interactions between robots and the environment, but also more and more complex processes. Sensing procedures, communications and other processes like cognitive reasoning may be first run on adapted and competitive simulation platforms to deal with optimal design. Virtual reality (VR) left the ghetto of visual rendering tool to become a more complete mean to handle basic simulation problems and to enable aggregation of complex functions for complex interactions. VR and robotics have met through Teleoperation. Historically, the first teleoperation systems were used as interfaces to control remotely robots by providing input tools and sensory feedback information. With technological improvements, VR shifted to be the main kernel for first, studies on advanced robotics systems studies like bio-inspired robots behavior, multi-robot systems, etc., and second, to provide advanced multi-modal interfaces for real time interactions with a useful level of abstraction. We present in this paper some basic robotics problems and the way VR can solve them. The first part of this paper discuss about the benefits of standardization and VR for complex robots systems. Then, we present some existing solutions and we analyze their drawbacks and advantages. Finally, we introduce an application where we take advantage of those features, in terms of efficiency in the development cycle and of reusability.