MPEG-4-Based Interactive Visualization as an Analysis Tool for Experiments in Robotics

This paper describes a tool for analyzing robotic experiments. The proposed tool uses the MPEG-4 standard to visualize information acquired during an experiment. To provide a sense of reality, we use a video taken by an overhead webcam monitoring the field where the experiment runs. On top of the video, we generate some synthetic objects representing information important to be visualized such as robot path, sensor values, robot state, linear camera data, etc., whose appearance can be controlled by users. With this tool, it is aimed that debugging robot programs will be much easier because of the visualization of the robots internal and external behavior. Another advantage of this tool is exchangeability, which means that the output of this tool is playable on many platforms and can be easily exchanged among researchers and students which benefits education and research cooperation purposes.