ARSEA: A Virtual Reality Subsea Exploration Assistant

Abstract

[eng] This paper presents a new application designed and developed to teleoperate underwater vehicles from a comfortable and immersive virtual reality environment. This environment is developed in Unity with the Oculus Rift as a visualizer, and communicates with the ROS-based underwater robot architecture via a Unity-ROS-bridge library. The proposed controlling system offers two main utilities: a) it permits to command the vehicle with two Oculus Touch Controllers, and b) contrarily to traditional Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) control panels, this environment shows an accumulative 3D reconstruction of the whole zone explored by the robot. The proposed solution also offers, inside the virtual environment, complete navigation data, such as, vehicle speed, global pose and distance to the bottom and the original images captured by the vehicle cameras, facilitating its continuous and on-line analysis and the process of navigation decision taking. Teleoperation experiments have been conducted with a simulated robot in an simulated aquatic environment, while environment perception experiments have been done reproducing ROS log files which contain stereo video sequences taken by the vehicle in real marine scenarios. The stereo images have been used to reconstruct the natural scenarios in the virtual reality environment.