Automatic environment map construction for mixed reality robotic applications

Abstract

As Virtual Reality technologies proliferate to traditional multimedia application areas, there is a need to create systemic and automated processes to establish the main building blocks of the virtual environments in support of such applications. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for procedurally creating a virtual reality replica of a remotely situated robot’s physical environment. The proposed approach utilizes only robot’s onboard camera and automatically generates the environment map for the final VR environment. The main contributions of this paper are in the hierarchical generation of the epirectangular panorama, the efficient diffuse filling of missing pixel values and the use of the developed virtual environment in improving telepresence for remote social robotics applications.