Unity ROS Teleoperation Project

Project Page

This repo contains a series of components for Unity XR teleoperation with ROS integration. It is designed to be run on a Quest 3 VR headset, and support OpenXR, hand tracking, Unity input system, and is built with Unity 2022.3.12f1.

For information on setting up Unity and opening this project Unity Quickstart, and for Quest information see Quest Quickstart.

Quickstart

On the ROS side, the custom TCP Endpoint needs to be run somewhere on the ROS network. This node is pretty lightweight so it can be run directly on a robot. Once the node is running the device running this app needs to connect to the ROS network, and the IP of the device running the TCP Endpoint needs to be set in the menu (see Menu for more information). If everything works, the menu should turn green, and data should be streaming between the app and ROS.

Components

Component	Description	Location	Preview	Status
Camera Viewer	Renders a ROS image stream to a floating image window	Assets/Components/CameraView		Functional
Hands	Hand tracking and pose publishing over ROS, compatible with Ability hand models	Assets/Components/Hands		Functional
Haptic	Bhaptic glove support plus controller haptics	Assets/Components/Haptics		Functional
Headset Publisher	Publishes headset and hand poses on TF and Pose	Assets/Components/HeadsetPublisher		Functional
Lidar	GPU rendering for LiDAR and PointCloud2 point viz from ROS	Assets/Components/Lidar		Functional
Menu	Palm menu for interaction and toggling	Assets/Components/Menu		Functional
NeRFViewer	Handheld viewer for rendering NeRFs and scene interaction	Assets/Components/NeRFViewer		Functional
PosePublisher	Publishes poses and Joystick commands for locomotion	Assets/Components/PosePublisher		Functional
Robots	Robot model manager, holds the meshes, materials and the scripts to swap between Anymal, ALMA, Standalone Dynaarm and Franka Panda	Assets/Components/Robots		Functional
Stereo	Stereo camera rendering, renders to each eye for human depth perception	Assets/Components/StereoImage		Functional
TF	WiP new TF system for managing robots and reorientation	Assets/Components/TFSystem		Incomplete
Voxblox	Voxel mesh rendering	Assets/Components/VoxBlox		Functional
VR Debug	Debugging tools for VR, namely a console	Assets/Components/VRDebug		Functional
VR Streamer	Streams a the VR view to a ROS topic (w/o AR view)	Assets/Components/VRStreamer		Functional

Scenes

In general the scenes should have a few objects by default:

• Light source (usually the default directional light)
• MR Interaction Setup (this enables AR/VR support and acts as a camera)
• Debug canvas (will autolink to the menu and shows debug messages)
• Palm Menu (menu to interact and toggle things with)
• Root (The roof of the TF/object tree and tagged at 'root')

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Version History

0.0.8

• Added versioning with display in debug mode
• Added standalone dynaarm, and franka panda robots
• Updated dynaarm for newer model (may still need simplification)
• Added robot manager for switching between robots

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Citing

If you use this project in your work please cite this paper:

@article{wildersmith2024rfteleoperation,
  author    = {Maximum Wilder-Smith, Vaishakh Patil, Marco Hutter},
  title     = {Radiance Fields for Robotic Teleoperation},
  journal   = {arXiv},
  year      = {2024},
}