05 - VR Drone Simulator

December 26, 2022

WARNING: This post is over a year old. Some of the information this contains may be outdated.

Description

Operating UAVs inside a building under construction is not an easy task. First, there are many obstacles (e.g., workers, machinery, and stacked materials) inside the building, and the building layouts change every week, unlike the outside. Second, visibility is limited when operating UAVs inside buildings. Even when operating UAVs with their own eyes, operators receive mental burden, stress, and fatigue from seeing the UAVs, manipulating the interface, and operating a series of them simultaneously. Therefore, when operating UAVs inside a building, it will be important to relieve the stress of the operator in an increasingly challenging and unfamiliar situation where visibility is limited. Lastly, the cost of making errors or mistakes is high since UAVs are fragile and expensive, and these mistakes also can lead to safety accidents for construction workers. In this sense, UAV operators are sometimes trained with virtual reality (VR) simulators. VR training is known to be effective training because the VR model resembles the real-world environment that might be experienced by the UAV operator. But these VR models used in the past studies are limited to outdoor models, not resemble inside of the building under construction which is a more complex and challenging work environment for operators. Our goal is to develop Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) models for training novice operators that will let their UAVs fly inside of the building during construction.

Implementation

The simulator was made in using Uniity.My duties included handling all the activities related to gameplay development and VR integeration.

A video of the VR simlulator is as follows-

A link to the research paper Here