Hierarchic Interactive Path Planning in Virtual Reality

To save time and money while designing new products, industry needs tools to design, test and validate the product using virtual prototypes. These virtual prototypes must enable to test the product at all Product Life-cycle Management (PLM) stages. Many operations in PLM involve human manipulation of product components in cluttered environment (product assembly, disassembly or maintenance). Virtual Reality (VR) enables real operators to perform these tests with virtual prototypes. This work introduces a novel path planning architecture allowing collaboration between a VR user and an automatic path planning system. It is based on an original environment model including semantic, topological and geometric information, and an automatic path planning process split in two phases: coarse (semantic and topological information) and fine (semantic and geometric information) planning. The collaboration between VR user and automatic path planner is made of 3 main aspects. First, the VR user is guided along a pre-computed path through a haptic device whereas he VR user can go away from the proposed path to explore possible better ways. Second the authority of automatic planning system is balanced to let the user free to explore alternatives (geometric layer). Third the intents of VR user are predicted (on topological layer) to be integrated in the re-planning process. Experiments are provided to illustrate the multi-layer representation of the environment, the path planning process, the control sharing and the intent prediction.