VERCD: A parallel physically based object simulation framework

Robotics systems in the recent decade have proliferated and have demonstrated remarkable breakthroughs, including vision, force control, machine intelligence, teleoperation among others. However, many of these concepts are in their infancy and are essentially being researched separately. For a viable engineering product, several of these concepts and ideas have to be integrated together within a single system. The research focus at Clark Atlanta University, includes work towards establishing such a framework. This paper outlines the preliminary stages and concepts related to the Virtual Environment for Robot Controller Design (VERCD) project, which uses an immersive virtual world to interact and design a virtual prototype of the robot, train this robot on simple and complex tasks and selectively validate its functionality through existing (real) systems. This paper presents the object based parallel simulation framework used to drive the virtual reality based environment. The scheme relies on the parallelism inherent in the object formulation and couples it with user provided embedded directives.