10,384 research outputs found
A Framework for Designing 3d Virtual Environments
The process of design and development of virtual environments can be supported by tools and frameworks, to save time in technical aspects and focusing on the content. In this paper we present an academic framework which provides several levels of abstraction to ease this work. It includes state-of-the-art components we devised or integrated adopting open-source solutions in order to face specific problems. Its architecture is modular and customizable, the code is open-source.\u
Inviwo -- A Visualization System with Usage Abstraction Levels
The complexity of today's visualization applications demands specific
visualization systems tailored for the development of these applications.
Frequently, such systems utilize levels of abstraction to improve the
application development process, for instance by providing a data flow network
editor. Unfortunately, these abstractions result in several issues, which need
to be circumvented through an abstraction-centered system design. Often, a high
level of abstraction hides low level details, which makes it difficult to
directly access the underlying computing platform, which would be important to
achieve an optimal performance. Therefore, we propose a layer structure
developed for modern and sustainable visualization systems allowing developers
to interact with all contained abstraction levels. We refer to this interaction
capabilities as usage abstraction levels, since we target application
developers with various levels of experience. We formulate the requirements for
such a system, derive the desired architecture, and present how the concepts
have been exemplary realized within the Inviwo visualization system.
Furthermore, we address several specific challenges that arise during the
realization of such a layered architecture, such as communication between
different computing platforms, performance centered encapsulation, as well as
layer-independent development by supporting cross layer documentation and
debugging capabilities
AirSim: High-Fidelity Visual and Physical Simulation for Autonomous Vehicles
Developing and testing algorithms for autonomous vehicles in real world is an
expensive and time consuming process. Also, in order to utilize recent advances
in machine intelligence and deep learning we need to collect a large amount of
annotated training data in a variety of conditions and environments. We present
a new simulator built on Unreal Engine that offers physically and visually
realistic simulations for both of these goals. Our simulator includes a physics
engine that can operate at a high frequency for real-time hardware-in-the-loop
(HITL) simulations with support for popular protocols (e.g. MavLink). The
simulator is designed from the ground up to be extensible to accommodate new
types of vehicles, hardware platforms and software protocols. In addition, the
modular design enables various components to be easily usable independently in
other projects. We demonstrate the simulator by first implementing a quadrotor
as an autonomous vehicle and then experimentally comparing the software
components with real-world flights.Comment: Accepted for Field and Service Robotics conference 2017 (FSR 2017
FlightGoggles: A Modular Framework for Photorealistic Camera, Exteroceptive Sensor, and Dynamics Simulation
FlightGoggles is a photorealistic sensor simulator for perception-driven
robotic vehicles. The key contributions of FlightGoggles are twofold. First,
FlightGoggles provides photorealistic exteroceptive sensor simulation using
graphics assets generated with photogrammetry. Second, it provides the ability
to combine (i) synthetic exteroceptive measurements generated in silico in real
time and (ii) vehicle dynamics and proprioceptive measurements generated in
motio by vehicle(s) in a motion-capture facility. FlightGoggles is capable of
simulating a virtual-reality environment around autonomous vehicle(s). While a
vehicle is in flight in the FlightGoggles virtual reality environment,
exteroceptive sensors are rendered synthetically in real time while all complex
extrinsic dynamics are generated organically through the natural interactions
of the vehicle. The FlightGoggles framework allows for researchers to
accelerate development by circumventing the need to estimate complex and
hard-to-model interactions such as aerodynamics, motor mechanics, battery
electrochemistry, and behavior of other agents. The ability to perform
vehicle-in-the-loop experiments with photorealistic exteroceptive sensor
simulation facilitates novel research directions involving, e.g., fast and
agile autonomous flight in obstacle-rich environments, safe human interaction,
and flexible sensor selection. FlightGoggles has been utilized as the main test
for selecting nine teams that will advance in the AlphaPilot autonomous drone
racing challenge. We survey approaches and results from the top AlphaPilot
teams, which may be of independent interest.Comment: Initial version appeared at IROS 2019. Supplementary material can be
found at https://flightgoggles.mit.edu. Revision includes description of new
FlightGoggles features, such as a photogrammetric model of the MIT Stata
Center, new rendering settings, and a Python AP
AlSub: Fully Parallel and Modular Subdivision
In recent years, mesh subdivision---the process of forging smooth free-form
surfaces from coarse polygonal meshes---has become an indispensable production
instrument. Although subdivision performance is crucial during simulation,
animation and rendering, state-of-the-art approaches still rely on serial
implementations for complex parts of the subdivision process. Therefore, they
often fail to harness the power of modern parallel devices, like the graphics
processing unit (GPU), for large parts of the algorithm and must resort to
time-consuming serial preprocessing. In this paper, we show that a complete
parallelization of the subdivision process for modern architectures is
possible. Building on sparse matrix linear algebra, we show how to structure
the complete subdivision process into a sequence of algebra operations. By
restructuring and grouping these operations, we adapt the process for different
use cases, such as regular subdivision of dynamic meshes, uniform subdivision
for immutable topology, and feature-adaptive subdivision for efficient
rendering of animated models. As the same machinery is used for all use cases,
identical subdivision results are achieved in all parts of the production
pipeline. As a second contribution, we show how these linear algebra
formulations can effectively be translated into efficient GPU kernels. Applying
our strategies to , Loop and Catmull-Clark subdivision shows
significant speedups of our approach compared to state-of-the-art solutions,
while we completely avoid serial preprocessing.Comment: Changed structure Added content Improved description
- …