Enhanced location tracking in sensor fusion-assisted virtual reality micro-manipulation environments

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) technology plays a significant role in many biomedical applications. These VR scenarios increase the valuable experience of tasks requiring great accuracy with human subjects. Unfortunately, commercial VR controllers have large positioning errors in a micro-manipulation task. Here, we propose a VR-based framework along with a sensor fusion algorithm to improve the microposition tracking performance of a microsurgical tool. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of Kalman filter in a millimeter scale VR environment, by using the position data between the VR controller and an inertial measuring device. This study builds and tests two cases: (1) without sensor fusion tracking and (2) location tracking with active sensor fusion. The static and dynamic experiments demonstrate that the Kalman filter can provide greater precision during micro-manipulation in small scale VR scenarios. © 2021 Prada et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.