Incorporating dynamic sensing in virtual environment for robotic tasks

Many robotic tasks involve dynamic interactions between the work piece and handling device, in which sensory information constitutes an indispensable part of the task. It is therefore of practical interests to incorporate sensor modules in the simulation stage to provide a more realistic preview of the operations and predict the behaviors of the components prior to the implementation on a real work cell. Most of the current Virtual Reality (VR) systems use geometric models and sensor-less robots for simulation, which cannot provide the insights into the real behaviors of the work cell components. In this paper, we report our work in studying the issues related to simulated sensors for dynamic interactions in Virtual Environment (VE) using physics based models. Based on previous development, a simplified force sensor is modeled and simulated. The current implementation was carried out on an PC based VR platform, with the low level programs developed using C++ via the system's development interface.