An immersion-type 3D dynamic simulation environment for developing human interactive robot systems

Abstract

This research paper proposes an immersion-type 3D dynamic simulation environment for designing and evaluating human-interactive robots. This simulation environment is composed of three components (an immersion-type display part, a 3D dynamic simulator part, and a motion capture part). In the immersion-type display part, audio and visual information is presented to subjects using virtual reality technology implemented by parallel processing in general-purpose computers. In the 3D dynamic simulator part, the dynamic movement produced by dynamic interaction between a virtual robot and a virtual subject that emulates the actual subject is calculated in real time. In the motion capture part, the movement of a robot with joints having many degrees of freedom is initially designed by capturing human movement. An experiment was carried out for a situation in which the robot is assumed to lift up a human, as a simulation aimed at realizing a robot that could be deployed in a nursing care facility, and the effectiveness of the proposed method was confirmed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 37(10): 47–57, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.20495