Formal text Formal text VIRTUOUS: AUTONOMOUS ACQUISITION OF VIRTUAL REALITY MODELS FROM REAL WORLD SCENES

Range and vision sensors are used to capture virtual reality models of a robot cell, its manipulation objects and environment. The captured models are used to develop and test user programs for the cell without using the cell itself. Finally, the user programs are downloaded into the cell and veriied. INTRODUCTION As virtual reality (VR) systems improve in performance attention is turning towards the content of virtual worlds and what can be done within virtual worlds. To make virtual worlds interesting detailed scene models must be built. The models need to contain 3D shapes as complex as those that we are familiar with from our everyday experience. Shape alone is not enough, the real world has an innnite variety of colours and textures which also need to be included in virtual worlds. Developing these models using 3D modelling software becomes more time consuming as the scene complexity increases. The objective of the project is to capture virtual reality (VR) models of real world scenes and then to use these models.