An advanced application for learning robotics using Augmented Reality

Robotics is a multidisciplinary branch of engineering that nowadays presents many challenges to overcome for having a greater presence and impact in our society. Due to its characteristics, usually it is investigated by the integration that it can have with other technologies and one of these is augmented reality (AR), which consists of combining the real and virtual world through computer processes, improving the visual experience and the scientific application. The main objective of this project is to develop an application that implements AR for the visual projection and supervision of robots, where the solution is based on a client-server architecture. The server is responsible for controlling the robot using ROS (Robotics Operative System), and the client is based on a platform compatible with Unity that includes the AR Vuforia engine, including the characteristics of graphic, physical and AR simulation of the robot to be controlled. To bring about this investigation it was used a configured Windows 10 environment with WSL (Windows Subsystem Linux), allowing ROS and Unity to coexist on the same machine, meanwhile, to overcome the communication challenge that exists between them, it used the solution proposed by the Unity Robotics Hub project. This software permits to add three robot models with distinctive characteristics to recreate some use cases with AR. Finally, it is possible to obtain an independent Unity client based on UWP (Universal Windows Platform) oriented to desktops and with AR functionalities.