Compact optical hardware-in-the-loop testing
TinyV3RSE, the Tiny Versatile 3D Reality Simulation Environment, is a compact optical hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) facility developed at DART for camera, image processing, and vision-based navigation (VBN) testing. It presents a controlled visual scene to a real camera so algorithms can be evaluated using images from the complete acquisition chain.
Display, optics, and camera
The facility combines a high-resolution display, a collimating optical system, and the camera under test on an optical bench. The display presents rendered space scenes. The collimator transforms the displayed image into an optical stimulus with the geometry of a distant scene, and the camera records the result.
Keeping the camera in the loop introduces sensor response, optical distortion, alignment error, and acquisition effects. A dark enclosure controls stray light for repeatable experiments. Geometric calibration relates displayed coordinates to measured image coordinates and characterizes distortions across the complete stimulation chain.
Applications
TinyV3RSE can support camera calibration, image-processing verification, feature-detection and tracking studies, VBN algorithm testing, and comparisons between synthetic source images and camera-acquired data. It provides a compact environment for investigating how a visual-navigation pipeline responds to real sensor and optical effects under controlled laboratory conditions.