Virtual Reality Robotics System for Education and Training

Abstract

Teaching robotics is often a theoretical task, since many universities may have one or none robots for practical courses, specially in underdeveloped countries that suffer the lack of technology facilities. Many robot simulators exist, all of them allow the user to modify the joint values or to solve inverse kinematics. Nevertheless, a low cost, immersive virtual reality system, to manipulate and program a robot is not yet developed. This paper proposes a novel virtual reality system to train on robotics systems. The main contribution of this paper is a system the lets the user immerse in a virtual reality simulation of a real robot programming environment, enhancing the experience by means of tactile (haptic) and 3D visual feedback. Additionally, forward and inverse kinematics for a CRS robot is presented to clarify some of our system advantages, ease of configuration and extendability. Our system is open source under the GNU/GPL license.