Mobile robots are playing a significant role in Higher Education science and engineering teaching, as they offer a flexible platform to explore and teach a wide-range of topics such as mechanics, electronics and software. Unfortunately the widespread adoption is limited by their high cost and the complexity of user interfaces and programming tools. To overcome these issues, a new affordable, adaptable and easy-to-use robotic platform is proposed. Mona is a low-cost, open-source and open-hardware mobile robot, which has been developed to be compatible with a number of standard programming environments. The robot has been successfully used for both education and research at The University of Manchester, UK.
VR is already evolving away from single user small-scale demonstrators, and inexorably toward sophisticated environments in which many geographically distributed users can perform a diverse range of activities. There will therefore be a pressure to make such environments increasingly general purpose and dynamic in their support of applications, paralleling perhaps the historical evolution of conventional operating systems. It is from speculations about the nature of such a future large-scale VR system that the AVIARY project has developed. AVIARY provides multiple worlds, each with its own set of laws, that may be tailored to suit particular application domains. The overall structure enables a coherent relationship between worlds to be maintained, which is important both for purposes of code reuse, and to aid users in navigating the system. A prototype implementation exists that addresses underlying implementation issues in the AVIARY model, and, in particular, distribution across heterogeneous processor networks, dynamic management of objects and message types within the system, the separation of graphics processing, and the management of spatial extent. Implementations of the prototype have been tested on a Transputer array, and a heterogeneous network of Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations. The system is currently being ported to a 2.4-Gflop KSR-1 parallel supercomputer. This paper reviews approaches to distributed, multi-application VR systems, presents pertinent elements of the AVIARY design, and describes the prototype implementation with particular attention given to the issues of distribution.
This paper describes a publicly available virtual reality (VR) system, GNU/MAVERIK, which forms one component of a complete VR operating system. We give an overview of the architecture of MAVERIK, and show how it is designed to use application data in an intelligent way, via a simple, yet powerful, callback mechanism that supports an object-oriented framework of classes, objects, and methods. Examples are given to illustrate different uses of the system and typical performance levels.
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