A virtual reality testbed for robot applications

The paper will describe the development of a Virtual Reality testbed for robot applications. This testbed was created to investigate the benefits of the new technology of man-machine-interfacing to robot simulation systems and to robot control systems. With this testbed, simulation concepts for industrial robots such as off-line programming, off-line teaching and robot work cell planning were evalutated. Furthermore, new concepts were developed in the area of teleoperation. Different to conventional robot simulation, human factors play an important role in virtual reality applications and have a strong influence on hardware and expecially software developments