CyPhER : a digital thread framework towards human-systems symbiosis

Cyber-physical twinning is an important area of study across multiple diverse fields. Creating more symbiotic human-machine partnerships facilitates extended reality. This thesis presents a flexible digital thread framework, CyPhER (Cyber Physical Extended Reality), as a platform and application agnostic solution for human-systems symbiosis. This framework includes software, techniques, and a reference architecture to allow for implementation in any field where cyber-physical twinning is possible. This thesis contains case studies carried out with industry partners in the domains of vocational education and robotics. These case studies demonstrate extended reality enabling human-systems symbiosis within their fields. When moving between these fields, CyPhER itself evolved, improving in terms of performance and capability. These applications required CyPhER to be deployed on a range of platforms spanning operating systems and form factors, which influenced its performance across these devices. Having flexibility in this approach allows CyPhER to address barriers in terms of computing apparatus in each field, such as edge devices. A cyber-physical extended reality is beneficial as a teaching aid, supporting a symbiotic process where both students and tutors can benefit from a teaching environment which utilises both the real and virtual worlds. It also benefits the field of automation, allowing for a symbiotic partnership between the human operator and systems. This is achieved through bidirectional interactions between robots and humans to enable enhanced operational decision support. Approaching these applications with a cyber-physical solution has enabled gains in usability, flexibility, and scalability in each field, abstracting complex systems with extended reality features to enable symbiosis between systems and the humans that control them. This is demonstrated in the consideration of control display gains in human-system interaction, which addresses the interaction barrier between the human and the system.Funded by Heriot-Watt Universit

A remote mobile collaborative AR system for learning in physics

10.1109/VR.2011.5759496Proceedings - IEEE Virtual Reality257-25