The Twente humanoid head and neck, in combination with Oculus Virtual Reality (VR) headset, was used to create an additional telepresence feature for the user. The humanoid head was equipped with a Kinect which allowed for stereo vision feedback to the user. Furthermore, the movement of the user was mimicked by the humanoid head.
When dealing with such VR-links, latency is an inherent problem. Moreover, VR-latency is known to cause VR-sickness. The current VR setup suffers from 300 to 400ms delay.
This master thesis aims to develop a new type of VR environment which can cope with significant time delays. In this way, the user should not feel any discomfort. Furthermore, a user study will be performed to assess the designed VR environment.
A vision sensor will be used to obtain Red,Green,Blue-Depth(RGB-D) images from the remote controlled robot. By using a Simultaneous Localization and Mapping(SLAM) algorithm, a virtual environment can be created. This environment is displayed to the user by means of a VR headset. Orientation data from sensors inside the VR headset will be used to determine a control signal for the robotic head. Important to note is that the movement of the user does not influence the movement of the robotic head directly. The VR environment for the user is constantly updated with new information from the vision sensor. This allows users to move their head freely in the VR environment.