Interconection of virtual environments with mechatronic systems

PubDate: November 2020

Teams: University of Craiova

Writers: Lidia-Cristina Bazavan; Horatiu Roibu; Florina Besnea Petcu; Stefan Irinel Cismaru; Bizdoaca Nicu George

PDF: Interconection of virtual environments with mechatronic systems

Abstract

The development of both hardware and software technology in recent years has led to the creation of complex virtual environments and boosted the desire of both users and developers to make them as immersive as possible. To achieve this immersion, virtual reality applications must interact with physical systems, that generally consist of command and control electronics, actuators and a sensory system. This paper presents a series of experiments performed by the authors in order to determine three major steps in the process of interaction between hardware systems and software emulating virtual environments: transpose the events from Unity virtual environment into signals necessary to control a physical system, transmission of the signals generated by the sensory system and, interpretation and conversion of those signals into events for the virtual reality application. Because interconnection involves both receiving and transmitting signals, the authors propose a two-way control interface implemented on different development boards. At the same time, the experiments aimed to observe the response of the physical systems and to determine an algorithm for correlating the action of the physical system, with a proportionality factor of one to one, related to the events that occurred in the virtual reality.