SIGVerse Tutorial at IROS Conference: Cloud-based VR platform for Human-Robot Interaction

Title

Half-Day Tutorial on SIGVerse (8th Nov. 2019 at IROS Conference)

Organizers:

• Tetsunari Inamura (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)
• Hiroyuki Okada (Tamagawa University, Japan)
• Yoshiaki Mizuchi (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)

Objectives:

This tutorial is aimed to provide an opportunity to learn how to use the SIGVerse, which is virtual reality (VR) based platform for human-robot interaction (HRI) research. Since collecting and storing a massive amount of data concerning multimodal interaction experiences is an important task concerning research on HRI, a cloud-based VR platform, named “SIGVerse,” which reduces costs of developing real robots and interaction experiments in the real world, is proposed. The system combines Unity and ROS frameworks to enable general users to login to an avatar in a robot simulator for the HRI experiments. The proposed architecture provides functionalities for constructing scalable 3D environments, embodied and social interaction via the Internet, compatible robot software, high-fidelity sensor feedback, and recording/playback of interaction. The following figure shows the concept of the SIGVerse platform.

This system is already used as an official software to organize a robot competition such as RoboCup@Home and World Robot Challenge to evaluate the effectiveness of the interaction between users and service robots in daily life environment. Developing actual service robots require huge time cost and budget cost; however, so many researchers and students can start up the research on HRI using service robot with our system. As well as the ROS middle can reduce the development cost of robot software, the SIGVerse has a great potential to accelerate the research on HRI.

The number of downloads of the system is over about 4000 from all over the world so far, and the system is used as an official software of robot competitions; however, we did not have an opportunity to have a face-to-face tutorial for the world-wide community. Thus, the IROS tutorial gives a great chance for the researchers and students to learn about how to use the SIGVerse system. On-line document is available from http://www.sigverse.org/wiki/en/

Note that this tutorial is sponsored by the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ), a sponsor of IROS. Thus, this is positioned as an extended version of the RSJ tutorial which is normally held during the IROS main conference (see RSJ Tutorial 2017, and RSJ Tutorial 2016).

Topics of interest

• Human-Robot Interaction
• Software Platform
• Virtual Reality
• Robot Competition (RoboCup@Home, World Robot Challenge)
• Dataset collection
• Unity 3D
• ROS
• Service Robots
• Daily life environment
• Learning by Demonstration
• Recognition of human activity
• Natural Language Generation