Overview

The Virtual Cooking project has been in existence since 2019 and aims to teach robots to grasp like humans so they can assist in cooking. The work of this project focuses on adding new objects to a virtual kitchen environment and analyzing different grasp types in it, considering where the objects were picked and how much force was applied. The way of grasping in the virtual environment will also be compared to how grasping works in real life.
We use Cybergloves and the OptiTrack tracking system to record human grasping movements in virtual reality. To display the collision between the data gloves and the objects, heat maps are generated and stored in a database.
In general, we use the Unreal Engine for 3D representation and Meshroom for 3D modelling of the objects.

Tasks

The tasks of the projects are divided into two parts - Virtual Reality and Photogrammetry. Further, Virtual Reality is segregated into three groups - Comparison, Annotation and Heat Map.

Photogrammetry

We worked on automatically creating 3D models from real life objects using Photogrammetry. Not only did we aim to automate the photogrammetry process but also the acquisition process.

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Annotation

The Annotation team's goal was to implement the automatic detection of everyday hand grasps, which could later contribute to the grasping mechanism improvement of kitchen robots.

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Heat Map

The goal of the heatmap team was to generate two different heatmaps: one to represent where the object was touched by the individual fingers and one to show the force used to hold an object.

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Comparison

The goal of the comparison team was to conduct an experiment demonstrating the differences and similarities between grasping objects in VR (Virtual Reality) and RR (Real Reality).

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Documentation

Presentations:

During the project related work was presented in order to provide a broad overview of the subject.

How tos:

About Us

The Virtual Cooking 2 team comprises of five Supervisors and fifteen students. Our team consists of students from the University of Bremen as well of students from the University of the Arts Bremen. There are designers and computer scientists. However, what connects us all is the interest in virtual reality and computer graphics.