ARE: Augmented Reality Environment for Mobile Robots

In this paper we present ARE, an Augmented Reality Environment, with the main purpose of providing cognitive robotics modelers with a development tool for constructing, at real-time, complex planning scenarios for robots, eliminating the need to model the dynamics of both the robot and the real environment as it would be required by whole simulation environments. The framework also builds a world model representation that serves as ground truth for training and validating algorithms for vision, motion planning and control. We demonstrate the application of the AR-based framework for evaluating the capability of the robot to plan safe paths to goal locations in real outdoor scenarios, while the planning scene dynamically changes, being augmented by virtual objects.