Overview of Insight
Insight is a 3D visualisation tool developed by BOW to allow developers and operators to interact with robots in real-time. It helps users gain a deeper understanding of their robot’s capabilities by providing an intuitive interface to visualise sensor data, issue motor commands, and control robots.
Insight works alongside BOW’s SDK, making it a versatile and robot-agnostic tool that can be used across different robot platforms. It’s a perfect companion to the BOW SDK, the BOW Simulator and your real-world, BOW-enabled robot.
Insight at a Glance
Real-Time Inverse Kinematics (IK)
Users can set IK objectives such as positions and orientations for the robot’s effectors and update them dynamically. BOW’s optimised IK algorithm helps solve these objectives quickly, accurately, and efficiently.
Robot Agnostic Control
Insight allows users to control a wide variety of robots from different manufacturers without needing specific hardware knowledge. By selecting a connected robot from a dropdown menu, users can start interacting with the robot in real-time.
3D Visualisation
The tool provides a central graphics area to visualise the robot's state, including sensor data and motor commands, which can be adjusted interactively.
Modality and Command Control
Insight allows users to visualise sensor modalities such as vision, audio, proprioception, and others, while simultaneously issuing commands such as speed or locomotion.
Technical Details
Insight provides a way to interact with the BOW SDK, offering an intuitive set of commands to control robots. It works by issuing the SDK’s GetModality and SetModality calls to gather sensor data and issue commands. Insight acts as a window into the robot’s state, allowing users to interact with the robot and adjust its motor objectives.
Inverse Kinematics in Insight
BOW’s approach to inverse kinematics (IK) allows users to provide complex motor objectives for its evolutionary algorithm to solve. Traditional IK solvers struggle with robots that have complex kinematic chains, such as humanoids, but BOW side-steps these issues by using a heavily optimised process of trial-and-error learning. The algorithm generates a population of random solutions and iterates until it finds a solution that minimises the discrepancy between the current and target effector positions/angles.
Insight is Not a Simulator
It’s important to note that Insight is not a physics simulator. Instead, it shows what the robot ‘knows’ about itself and its surroundings, by visualising sensor information and motor options in real-time. The tool provides a form of introspection, displaying only the information the robot can perceive directly, rather than the results of a physics simulation. It works side by side with simulation tools such as BOW’s integrated version of Webots, or your real-world BOW-enabled robot.
It’s important to note that Insight is not a physics simulator. Instead, it shows what the robot ‘knows’ about itself and its surroundings, by visualising sensor information and motor options in real-time. The tool provides a form of introspection, displaying only the information the robot can perceive directly, rather than the results of a physics simulation. It works side by side with simulation tools such as BOW’s integrated version of Webots, or your real-world BOW-enabled robot.
Multi-Robot Control
Insight enables real-time control of multiple robots from a single interface, making it possible to manage different types of robots—such as quadrupeds, arms, or wheeled robots—simultaneously. Its robot-agnostic design lets users issue the same high-level commands across various robots without needing to adjust for specific hardware. Insight provides real-time feedback and visualisation for all connected robots, allowing operators to monitor their actions and sensor data in parallel. This feature is ideal for efficiently managing fleets of robots in dynamic environments.
Teleoperation with Insight
Insight can also be used for teleoperation, allowing operators to remotely control robots in real time. Through live video streams from the robot’s cameras, users can adjust the robot’s movements using inverse kinematics and receive immediate feedback from its sensors. This feature is especially useful for robots operating in environments that are hard to access or beyond the line-of-sight, enhancing the control and flexibility of robotic applications.
This teleoperation capability provides developers with a seamless way to remotely manage robots, monitor their surroundings, and adjust movements on the fly, making it a practical tool for inspection, exploration, and remote operations.
Insight for the Future of Robotics
Insight marks an important milestone in the field of robotics, enabling developers to control multiple robots simultaneously and interact with them using real-time feedback. Whether controlling robot arms, quadrupeds, or humanoids, Insight provides a unified interface for interaction and development. The BOW SDK’s flexibility and Insight’s real-time capabilities make it a powerful tool for both robotic development and practical applications.
