ARviz: An Augmented Reality-Enabled Visualization Platform for ROS Applications

Current robot interfaces, such as teach pendants and 2D screen displays, used for task visualization and interaction often seem unintuitive and limited in terms of information flow. This compromises task efficiency as interacting with the interface can distract the user from the task at hand. Augmented reality (AR) technology offers the capability to create visually rich displays and intuitive interaction elements in situ. In recent years, AR has shown promising potential to enable effective human-robot interaction (HRI). We introduce ARviz, a versatile, extendable AR visualization platform built for robot applications developed with the widely used robot operating system (ROS) framework. ARviz aims to provide both a universal visualization platform with the capability of displaying any ROS message data type in AR, as well as a multimodal user interface for interacting with robots over ROS. ARviz is built as a platform incorporating a collection of plugins that provide visualization and/or interaction components. Users can also extend the platform by implementing new plugins to suit their needs. We present three use cases as well as two potential use cases to showcase the capabilities and benefits of the ARviz platform for HRI applications. The open access source code for our ARviz platform is available at: https://github.com/hri-group/arviz. © 1994-2011 IEEE.