SimVR-Robotics: A Virtual Reality Tool for Evaluating and Planning the Use of Robots in Offshore Scenarios

The Oil & Gas industry have been focusing on robots to accomplish several offshore activities as a way to diminish production costs, replace workers during hazardous operational procedures, enabling exploration in remote places and, in particular, deep-water regions. The project and validation of a robotic task on a virtual environment aids studies on how to introduce robots in these environments in an efficient way and, when compared to actual tests, significantly reduce costs and help to mitigate operational risks. In this context, we present SimVR-Robotics, a virtual reality tool to plan, simulate and evaluate the use of robots on offshore scenarios. SimVR-Robotics is capable to recreate realistic environments and to reproduce accurately physics with multiple robots. The user can create complex scenes from a model library and simulate them in real time or, if desired, use the graphic editor to create and configure its own robot. Several components are provided to view the simulation data, control the robots and objects in the scene, and assess the feasibility of the projected scenarios. In addition, the software offers, to advanced users, access to its internal API to control the various components of the scene. As the tool is based on the ROS (Robot Operating System), it is extremely easy to integrate with other external simulators. In this article, we discuss the SimVR-Robotics architecture, as well as its most important resources. To illustrate its benefits, present two real applications: a trajectory study of a robotic arm and planning an underwater operation using an ROV (Remote Operated Vehicle).