ARDev Mobile Robot Application

Developing mobile robot applications in the real world is difficult. ARDev is open source tool designed to create a shared perceptual space for human to see the world from a robots point view. This is achieved by augmenting a live video feed with virtual objects resulting in an Augmented Reality (AR) visualization toolkit used to visualize robot data. This project goal is to expand and improve ARDev so that it may become more widespread and ubiquitous within mobile robot development. The main contributions of this works are new features including runtime configuration of objects and views, control over a virtual camera and further modularization with the addition of plug-ins. Configuration of runtime allows the developer to change the visualized data depending on the particular sensor or visualization of interest. The virtual camera allows for different views of the same scene or data to increase the developers understanding of sensor data. Plug-ins provides a convenient extension point for further development. Overall the contributions have improved greatly ARDev for mobile robot development.

ARDev was initially built to interface with player and recently can visualize a core set of Player drivers. However with its modular software architecture, ARDev allows for other general augmented reality use. The AR system is intended to display visually robot data and provide an insight into the world from the robots perspective.

Player is a network device server oriented. Player provides transparent network access to various actuators and sensors. The Player modular architecture allows the creation of modules for any system that supports TCP/IP. Player provides a visualization tool which displays robot data, however this tool lacks the context of data for the visualizations and this limits its usefulness. The core functionality of ARDev show three lasers, color red, green, and blue overlaid on a camera feed. The pat of the robot is also shown in yellow.

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