An Evaluation of Open Source Physics Engines for Use in Virtual Reality Assembly Simulations

Hummel, Johannes; Wolff, Robin; Stein, Tobias; Gerndt, Andreas; Kuhlen, Torsten

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-33191-6_34

Cited by 31 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Many important works were published in the past years regarding dynamics simulation [31], and several physics libraries are publicly available, each one with its advantages and disadvantages. Our choice for Bullet is because this engine is open source, multi-platform, supported by an active community of developers, and it ranks better performance results compared to other libraries [32].…”

Section: Movement Simulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

VR-OOS: The DLR's virtual reality simulator for telerobotic on-orbit servicing with haptic feedback

Sagardia

Hertkorn

Hulin

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE Aerospace Conference

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The growth of space debris is becoming a severe issue that urgently requires mitigation measures based on maintenance, repair, and de-orbiting technologies. Such on-orbit servicing (OOS) missions, however, are delicate and expensive. Virtual Reality (VR) enables the simulation and training in a flexible and safe environment, and hence has the potential to drastically reduce costs and time, while increasing the success rate of future OOS missions. This paper presents a highly immersive VR system with which satellite maintenance procedures can be simulated interactively using visual and haptic feedback. The system can be used for verification and training purposes for human and robot systems interacting in space. Our framework combines unique realistic virtual reality simulation engines with advanced immersive interaction devices. The DLR bimanual haptic device HUG is used as the main user interface. The HUG is equipped with two light-weight robot arms and is able to provide realistic haptic feedback on both human arms. Additional devices provide vibrotactile and electrotactile feedback at the elbow and the fingertips. A particularity of the realtime simulation is the fusion of the Bullet physics engine with our haptic rendering algorithm, which is an enhanced version of the Voxmap-Pointshell Algorithm. Our haptic rendering engine supports multiple objects in the scene and is able to compute collisions for each of them within 1 msec, enabling realistic virtual manipulation tasks even for stiff collision configurations. The visualization engine ViSTA is used during the simulation to achieve photo-realistic effects, increasing the immersion. In order to provide a realistic experience at interactive frame rates, we developed a distributed system architecture, where the load of computing the physics simulation, haptic feedback and visualization of a complex scene is transferred to dedicated machines. The implementations are presented in detail and the performance of the overall system is validated. Additionally, a preliminary user study in which the virtual system is compared to a physical test bed shows the suitability of the VR-OOS framework.

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Section: Movement Simulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

VR-OOS: The DLR's virtual reality simulator for telerobotic on-orbit servicing with haptic feedback

Sagardia

Hertkorn

Hulin

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE Aerospace Conference

Self Cite

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“…It concludes that the engines used in the research community are inadequate as they fail to solve even simple problems physically correct. An evaluation of engines for assembly simulations were performed in [11], which focuses on assembly in virtual reality for use in training astronauts in servicing tasks. The results are in good correspondence with the results presented in this paper.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

RobWorkPhysicsEngine: A new dynamic simulation engine for manipulation actions

Thulesen

Petersen

2016

2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

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Simulation in robotics is often based on physics engines developed for computer games and animation. These engines are inaccurate due to the applied first order numerical integration and because their ways to resolve redundant contacts lead to contact forces that are distributed in a physically unreasonable way among multiple contacts. In this paper, we present a new physics engine that resolves these flaws by designing and implementing a second order integration method, and by a new way of defining the contact-force resolution problem. We illustrate the improvement over state-of-the-art engines by a number of experiments. The new engine is proven to be particularly suitable for simulating tight fitting assembly operations where multiple contacts occur between the objects involved.

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“…The ODE is well known for its high performance, free and easy access and the real-time simulation capabilities. It is mainly used in robotics and vehicle simulations, virtual reality environments, computer games and simulation tools [21][22][23].…”

Section: Fluid-structure Interactionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Validation of the GPU-Accelerated CFD Solver ELBE for Free Surface Flow Problems in Civil and Environmental Engineering

et al. 2015

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This contribution is dedicated to demonstrating the high potential and manifold applications of state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools for free-surface flows in civil and environmental engineering.All simulations were performed with the academic research code ELBE (efficient lattice boltzmann environment, http://www.tuhh.de/elbe). The ELBE code follows the supercomputing-on-the-desktop paradigm and is especially designed for local supercomputing, without tedious accesses to supercomputers. ELBE uses graphics processing units (GPU) to accelerate the computations and can be used in a single GPU-equipped workstation of, e.g., a design engineer. The code has been successfully validated in very different fields, mostly related to naval architecture and mechanical engineering. In this contribution, we give an overview of past and present applications with practical relevance for civil engineers. The presented applications are grouped into three major categories: (i) tsunami simulations, considering wave propagation, wave runup, inundation and debris flows; (ii) dam break simulations; and (iii) numerical wave tanks for the calculation of hydrodynamic loads on fixed and moving bodies. This broad range of applications in combination with accurate numerical results and very competitive times to solution demonstrates that modern CFD tools in general, and the ELBE code in particular, can be a helpful design tool for civil and environmental engineers.

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An Evaluation of Open Source Physics Engines for Use in Virtual Reality Assembly Simulations

Cited by 31 publications

References 4 publications

VR-OOS: The DLR's virtual reality simulator for telerobotic on-orbit servicing with haptic feedback

VR-OOS: The DLR's virtual reality simulator for telerobotic on-orbit servicing with haptic feedback

RobWorkPhysicsEngine: A new dynamic simulation engine for manipulation actions

Validation of the GPU-Accelerated CFD Solver ELBE for Free Surface Flow Problems in Civil and Environmental Engineering

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