News

• 16/06/08 : The vug-simulator 2.0 installer for WindowsXP is now available here.
• 01/05/08 : Important website update.
• 17/04/08 : New demo of the VUG-SEAR project
• 19/12/07 : The VUG Simulator API is now available.
• 18/12/07 : How to quickly install and drive the VUG simulator video
• 17/12/07 : The vug-simulator installation software is now available for WinXP

Note : The VUG project source code is available via SVN (URL = "http://vug.googlecode.com/svn/tags/0.0.3").

What's V.U.G ?

V.U.G stands for Virtual Universe Generator. It's an open source project started and developped by four students of Sherbrooke's University. The primary goal of this project was to provide a "as friendly as possible " user interface that would allow the creation of a virtual world driven by basic physics laws in which the user would be able to :

• Create and modify the environnement (physic laws, objects, ...).
• Add static and dynamic objects (before the simulation or in real-time).
• Move inside the world and interract in real-time with it.

In order to achieve such a thing, we've based our works on already existing technology, interfacing them so it could ultimatly be easily modified to fit, change or remove some parts or modules.

At this day, those technologies are directly linked to the core of the application :

• OGRE 3D
• Open Dynamic Engine (ODE)
• Qt -- Trolltech

The application is 100% C++ code and as a strong object oriented design.

Recently, V.U.G was used in study regarding simulation of environnements of robotic assistance (tele-nursing) using the Nintendo wiimote as a starter for intuitive piloting of the robot arms. Check VUG-SEAR sub-project for more info about this.

New VUG-SEAR release is now integrated into VUG

VUG-SEAR was an idea proposed by Bessam Abdulrazak, in which he would like to use the vug-simulator to simulate en environnement of robotic assistance. The idea was well received and then some more ideas came, concerning the use of intuitive controller to help the remote piloting of a robot. The API design was then reviewed and modified to provide and easy to use programmable interface that would manage the communications between the actions of the pilot with it's controller to the simulated robot. So, we've decided with enthusiast to use the Nintendo Wiimote as our intuitive controller to pilot the robot, but the ultimate goal of this interface is to use it in a real robot manipulation.

As of today, we managed to create some nice scenes and simulations that can be loaded in the vug-simulator. We've worked hard on implementing a driver and a big configuration tool for the Nintendo Wiimote. We tried to keep it as user friendly as possible during the developpement.

Technologies used in this project :

• Ogre3D Graphics Engine (ogre3d.org)
• ODE Physics Engine (ode.org)
• QT Framework (trolltech.com)
• Encapsulation of Wiiuse Wiimote library

The main features we've implemented in this project :

• Motion detection and analysis.
• 3D controllable objects with physics (Robot Arm).
• 3D Vision experimentation (based on Johnny Chung Lee's work).
• Actions associated to the wiimote commands are configurable.
• Multiple configurations of the wiimote + Dynamic navigation through one another.

For more info, here's some research documents:

1. Project description (French).
2. General information research (French).

Last modif : [07/04/08]