Technologies: Oculus Rift, C++, Arduino, Qt

DORA (http://doraplatform.com) is an immersive teleoperated robotic platform designed for navigation and exploration of remote locations. Through the use of a virtual reality head mounted display such as the Oculus Rift DK2, the system can mimic the head movements of the user, while providing visual feedback through two cameras mounted on the head of the robot. The project won 1st place in Intel’s annual engineering competition Intel Cornell Cup, and got covered by media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, IEEE Spectrum, Popular Science, IGN and Engadget. The video below demonstrates the system working wirelessly.

The system is made up of a 3 Degrees of Freedom head gimbal that tracks the orientation of the user, along with a 3 Degrees of Freedom translation stage system that tracks the user’s head position. In addition, the gimbal and stages sit on a mobile base that the user can control with a standard game controller. All of these systems are wireless. We’ve also made a clean graphical user interface envisioning the future of this system, where a user can sign in and then choose a location to go to, to connect to the robot stationed at that location.

I was specifically responsible for implementing everything on the user end, which includes the communication between the user and the Arduinos and the cameras, the rendering of the camera images using the Oculus C API, and the GUI created using Qt.