Integration of manufacturing services into virtual environments over the internet

Virtual reality (VR) is a rapidly developing technology that has a wide spectrum of industrial and commercial applications. Networked (distributed or shared) virtual environments (VE) are of growing interest to modern manufacturing industry; a dominating use of networked virtual manufacturing environments (VMEs) is on-line visualisation and collaborative control of 3D information. This has to be supported by real-time data transfer. To meet a broad range of common requirements for Internet-based VE communications, particularly for virtual manufacturing and collaborative design and control, this paper presents a networked virtual environment system that is designed to support networked virtual design and manufacturing. The system is implemented with manufacturing message specification (MMS) standards so as to integrate a range of manufacturing services into networked VEs over the Internet.     

一个基于Web的网络虚拟现实系统的设计与实现

虚拟现实技术发展很快,有广泛的工业和商业应用。网络虚拟现实技术已越来越为工业制造业所关注,虚拟制造环境(VME)的一个主要用途是在线可视化和对3D信息的协作控制,这需要实时数据传输的支持。为了满足基于Internet的VE通信需求,特别是为满足虚拟制造和协作设计和控制,该文设计并实现了一个支持网络虚拟设计和制造的网络虚拟现实系统,此系统用MMS协议实现VE通信,并将工业控制服务集成于基于Internet的虚拟环境中。     

An internet based virtual exhibition system: Conceptual deisgn and infrastructure

Virtual reality technology has wide applications in manufacturing, service industry, and medical training. In addition to essential presence, virtual reality provides secure and economical environment for participants to experience the virtual world rather than the corresponding real world. With advent of rapidly developed technology, there are numerous new products and projects to be introduced in exhibition shows over the world everyday and it is neither prudent nor possible to attend all of them. There have been overwhelming amount of virtual exhibitions available on the Internet; however, most of them are not satisfactory in terms of performance and users cannot get a full understanding on the product interested due to low sense of presence. Information coordination, other than information share and distribution, between the participants is crucial but not yet well defined in the current virtual exhibitions. It is prominent to develop Internet based virtual reality exhibition systems that agglomerate the advantages of efficiency/accessibility on the Internet and high sense of presence in virtual environment. The Internet based virtual exhibition systems are not only as informative as traditional exhibitions but also more flexible to relax temporal and spatial constraints to allow users attend exhibitions anytime and anywhere.     

DIVE—A platform for multi-user virtual environments

The Distributed Interactive Virtual Environment (DIVE) is an experimental software platform for the development of multi-user virtual reality applications. DIVE uses active replication and reliable multicast protocols to distribute data between participants. The distribution model enables a large number of users and applications to participate and interact in the same virtual environment. The DIVE platform offers a wide range of interaction support and user-related abstractions to ease the task of application and user interface construction.     

Tangled reality

Leonardo da Vinci was a strong advocate for using sketches to stimulate the human imagination. Sketching is often considered to be integral to the process of design, providing an open workspace for ideas. For these same reasons, children use sketching as a simple way to express visual ideas. By merging the abstraction of human drawings and the freedom of virtual reality with the tangibility of physical tokens, Tangled Reality creates a rich mixed reality workspace. Tangled Reality allows users to build virtual environments based on simple colored sketches and traverse them using physical vehicles overlayed with virtual imagery. This setup allows the user to “build” and “experience” mixed reality simulations without ever touching a standard computer interface.     

Flexible system for simulating and tele‐operating robots through the internet

Simulation and teleoperation tools offer many advantages for the training or learning of technological subjects, such as flexibility in time‐tables and student access to expensive and limited equipment. In this paper, we present a new system for simulating and tele‐operating robot arms through the Internet, which allows many users to simulate and test positioning commands for a robot by means of a virtual environment, as well as execute the validated commands in a real remote robot of the same characteristics. The main feature of the system is its flexibility in managing different robots or including new robot models and equipment. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Teaching your system to share

Creating multi-user virtual worlds is a relatively new challenge for developers of virtual reality applications. It is especially challenging to build networked VR systems based on inexpensive PC-based hardware, due to limitations in system software and inefficient networking hardware. This article explains how we created a multi-person shared virtual environment using DOS-based PCs. It also covers some of the design goals in creating a collaborative design tool for creating and modifying virtual buildings. Workroom is a general purpose simulation infrastructure that allows multiple participants to interact in unpredictable ways while minimizing simulation latency     

A task‐based and resource‐aware approach to dynamically generate optimal software architecture for intelligent service robots

Intelligent service robots provide various services to users by understanding the context and goals of a user task. In order to provide more reliable services, intelligent service robots need to consider various factors, such as their surrounding environments, users' changing needs, and constrained resources. To handle these factors, most of the intelligent service robots are controlled by a task‐based control system, which generates a task plan that represents a sequence of actions, and executes those actions by invoking the corresponding functions. However, the traditional task‐based control systems lack the consideration of resource factors even though intelligent service robots have limited resources (limited computational power, memory space, and network bandwidth). Moreover, system‐specific concerns such as the relationships among functional modules are not considered during the task generation phase. Without considering both the resource conditions and interdependencies among software modules as a whole, it will be difficult to efficiently manage the functionalities that are essential to provide core services to users. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for intelligent service robots to efficiently use their resources on‐demand by separating system‐specific information from task generation. We have defined a sub‐architecture that corresponds to each action of a task plan, and provides a way of using the limited resources by minimizing redundant software components and maintaining essential components for the current action. To support the optimization of resource consumption, we have developed a two‐phase optimization process, which is composed of the topological and temporal optimization steps. We have conducted an experiment with these mechanisms for an infotainment robot, and simulated the optimization process. Results show that our approach contributed to increase the utilization rate by 20% of the robot resources. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于Internet的多用户共享虚拟环境框架的研究

多用户共享虚拟环境是指网络化的协同虚拟现实系统，在该环境中多个用户之间通过各自的三维图形表示实现在虚拟环境中的多人感知，用户之间的交互以及对虚拟对象的协同操纵，在综合分析现有系统以及Internet的开放性标准化需求基础上，提出了一种基于Internet的多用户共享虚拟环境解决方案，即多用户共享虚拟环境框架（multi-user shared virtual envitonment framework,MSVEF)，该框架描述了多用户虚拟环境的体系结构，定义了基于XML的相关交互协议，通过在原型系统中的初步应用，证明该框架可以支持不同网络平台的用户在同一个虚拟场景中的再现与交互。     

Internetworked graphics and the Web

Although the networking and computer graphics fields are considered to be distinct disciplines, they must begin to converge in order to support collaborative exploration and information visualization on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Telecommunication breakthroughs remove bottlenecks and provide new opportunities for interactive 3D graphics across globally interconnected, dissimilar networks. Multicast backbone tools, developed in the networking arena, provide desktop videoconferencing tools for sharing information visualization and virtual reality explorations. The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), developed in the computer graphics arena, supports the 3D display and fly-through of networked computing resources on the Internet. The computer graphics community considers VRML to be an interactive tool for exploring content on the Web. The telecommunications community calls it an application on the networking infrastructure. The authors define the concept of internetworked graphics to describe the future merger and dependencies of computer graphics applications and the telecommunications networking infrastructure     

基于光学映射虚物体的并行绘制

尽管当前基于全局光照模型的图形绘制方法可以渲染出高质量的图象 ,但因为其计算量巨大 ,难以适用于诸如建筑物漫游、虚拟现实等对绘制速度有严格要求的场合 .为此引入光学映射虚物体的概念 ,利用构建在联网PC机上的集群系统 ,并行创建反射和折射虚物体 ,然后利用集群中各节点的图形加速硬件 ,像处理实际三维物体一样绘制这些虚物体 ,可以快速地绘制出反射 /折射效果的图象 .实验结果证明 ,该方法利用 CU P的计算能力和图形硬件的加速特性实现了真实感图形的高性能绘制 ,特别适用于诸如建筑物漫游、计算机动画和虚拟现实等要求交互式绘制的场合     

Sharing VLNET worlds on the Web

Virtual environments define a new interface for networked multimedia applications. The sense of “presence” in the virtual environment is an important requirement for collaborative activities involving multiple remote users working with social interactions. Using virtual actors within the shared environment is a supporting tool for presence. In this paper, we present a shared virtual life network with virtual humans that provides a natural interface for collaborative working and we describe the bridge we realized between this 3D shared world and the Web through a system of 3D snapshots.     

A Spoken Dialogue System for Navigation in Non-Immersive Virtual Environments

Navigation is the process by which people control their movement in virtual environments and is a corefunctional requirement for all virtual environment (VE) applications. Users require the ability to move, controllingorientation, direction of movement and speed, in order to achieve a particular goal within a VE. Navigation israrely the end point in itself (which is typically interaction with the visual representations of data) but applicationsoften place a high demand on navigation skills, which in turn means that a high level of support for navigationis required from the application. On desktop systems navigation in non‐immersive systems is usually supportedthrough the usual hardware devices of mouse and keyboard. Previous work by the authors shows that many usersexperience frustration when trying to perform even simple navigation tasks — users complain about getting lost,becoming disorientated and finding the interface `difficult to use'. In this paper we report on work in progressin exploiting natural language processing (NLP) technology to support navigation in non‐immersive virtualenvironments. A multi‐modal system has been developed which supports a range of high‐level (spoken) navigationcommands and indications are that spoken dialogue interaction is an effective alternative to mouse and keyboardinteraction for many tasks. We conclude that multi‐modal interaction, combining technologies such as NLP withmouse and keyboard may offer the most effective interaction with VEs and identify a number of areas where furtherwork is necessary. ACM CSS: I.3.6 Computer Graphics Methodology and Techniques—Interaction and Techniques, I.3.7 Three‐DimensionalGraphics and Realism—Virtual Reality, I.2.7 Natural Language Processing—Speech Recognitionand Synthesis     

Harvesting Robots for High‐value Crops: State‐of‐the‐art Review and Challenges Ahead

This review article analyzes state‐of‐the‐art and future perspectives for harvesting robots in high‐value crops. The objectives were to characterize the crop environment relevant for robotic harvesting, to perform a literature review on the state‐of‐the‐art of harvesting robots using quantitative measures, and to reflect on the crop environment and literature review to formulate challenges and directions for future research and development. Harvesting robots were reviewed regarding the crop harvested in a production environment, performance indicators, design process techniques used, hardware design decisions, and algorithm characteristics. On average, localization success was 85%, detachment success was 75%, harvest success was 66%, fruit damage was 5%, peduncle damage was 45%, and cycle time was 33 s. A kiwi harvesting robot achieved the shortest cycle time of 1 s. Moreover, the performance of harvesting robots did not improve in the past three decades, and none of these 50 robots was commercialized. Four future challenges with R&D directions were identified to realize a positive trend in performance and to successfully implement harvesting robots in practice: (1) simplifying the task, (2) enhancing the robot, (3) defining requirements and measuring performance, and (4) considering additional requirements for successful implementation. This review article may provide new directions for future automation projects in high‐value crops.     

Pointing in the third-person: an exploration of human motion and visual pointing aids for 3D virtual mirrors

Virtual Reality - A “virtual mirror” is a promising interface for virtual or augmented reality applications in which users benefit from seeing themselves within the environment, such as...     

PLEIADES: An Internet‐based parallel/distributed system

The use of LAN‐based clusters of computers for computational purposes has been in use for several years with significant success and acceptability. The introduction of the Internet infrastructure as the interconnection medium of the cluster allows for additional flexibility and transparency of such systems. PLEIADES is an Internet‐based parallel/distributed system whose purpose is to allow users to use distant computational resources in order to form virtual clusters. In addition, PLEIADES can be used as a computational infrastructure service provider for applications in need of computational resources. PLEIADES uses a tiered architecture with particular emphasis on the existence of a middle tier, whose task is to assist in the communication between the interface and the resource management tiers. The existence of the middle tier allows for the creation of an open system that is able to easily integrate with new resource management platforms and tools. Since the use of a mature resource management system for parallel/distributed computing was a prerequisite of the PLEIADES architecture, the Condor resource management environment was used. The design and implementation characteristics of PLEIADES together with some experimental uses of the system are also presented. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

一个沉浸式场景漫游系统的构建

虚拟现实技术,是一种可以创建和体验虚拟环境的计算机系统技术,在军事、游戏、室内设计等诸多领域都有着广泛的应用。一个沉浸式的虚拟现实系统,可以让用户完全沉浸在虚拟世界中,得到与真实世界近似相同的感受。在高精度定位跟踪系统的辅助下,利用visual studio开发环境和3ds max、virtools软件构建了一个沉浸式场景漫游系统,并给出了一个游戏应用示例和一个室内设计应用示例。     

Development and evaluation of a virtual training environment for on-line robot programming

The paper reports on the development and evaluation of a virtual reality system to support training in on-line programming of industrial robots. The system was evaluated by running training experiments with three groups of engineering students in the real, virtual and virtual augmented robot conditions. Results suggest that, the group with prior training in the virtual reality system augmented with cognitive/perceptual aids clearly outperformed the group that executed the tasks in the real robot only. The group trained in the non-augmented virtual reality system did not demonstrate the same results. It is concluded that the cognitive/perceptual aids embedded in the augmented virtual reality system had a positive effect on all task performance metrics and on the consistency of results across participants on the real robot. Virtual training environments need not be designed as close as possible to the real ones. Specifically designed augmented cognitive/perceptual aids may foster skill development that can be transferred to the real task. The suggested training environment is simple and cost effective in training of novices in an entry level task.     

Demographic differences in presence across seven studies

Virtual Reality - It is often necessary for virtual reality (VR) users to experience a sense of presence for the benefits of VR applications to be realized. However, feelings of presence are...