Developing an AR/VR solution for advanced visualization of robotic installations has its own set of tasks to tackle. For many users, this might be the first encounter of graphical/gaming engines. Even for experienced individuals, developing with these engines involves a significant amount of "trial and error". Hence, the first working prototype of an application is the result of frequent re-implementation of basic steps and the coherent time (and patience) investment. This showcase demonstration primarily concerns the development side within the game engine "Unity3D" (www.unity.com). Based on the ROS# plugin (https://github.com/siemens/ros-sharp) published by Siemens, MirrorLabs already developed use-cases and prototype to demonstrate the potential of it. This demonstration includes a couple of use cases that include the Microsoft HoloLens, two different types of cobots (UR5 and Doosan M1013), and the mentioned software. Using the MirrorLabs framework, applications made with Unity can interact with any ROS (www.ros.org) environment by subscribing or publishing to topics. Effectively enabling a user to visualize the behavior of robots in AR or VR. However, the setting up of such a project requires a developer to follow specific steps and tends to involve the mentioned "trial and error" phase. Within the spectrum of MirrorLabs, we want to enable both, new and experienced users, to reach their goals as fast as possible. Therefore, we are developing (among other things) a setup-assistant framework, which streamlines the setup of a generic project. This features a scene configurator, which generates a basic scene based on the user's preferences. The new scene is directly ready for testing. Furthermore, any already existing project can be upgraded for ROS-communication with a separate function. This function adds a working robot model (based on the user's choice), all additional necessities, and takes care of the referencing between all of them. Using these functions, the effective work time required to develop a basic, ROS compatible AR/VR application is reduced to minutes. As an extra, all MirrorLabs projects available with the next release update will feature a variety of basic scenes and a library of tested robots, ready for testing directly.
- made by the MirrorLabs partners from TU Delft-