  Simulation tools are essential for robotics research, especially for those
domains in which safety is crucial, such as Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC).
However, it is challenging to simulate human behaviors, and existing robotics
simulators do not integrate functional human models. This work presents
Open-VICO, an open-source toolkit to integrate virtual human models in Gazebo
focusing on vision-based human tracking. In particular, Open-VICO allows to
combine in the same simulation environment realistic human kinematic models,
multi-camera vision setups, and human-tracking techniques along with numerous
robot and sensor models thanks to Gazebo. The possibility to incorporate
pre-recorded human skeleton motion with Motion Capture systems broadens the
landscape of human performance behavioral analysis within Human-Robot
Interaction (HRI) settings. To describe the functionalities and stress the
potential of the toolkit four specific examples, chosen among relevant
literature challenges in the field, are developed using our simulation utils:
i) 3D multi-RGB-D camera calibration in simulation, ii) creation of a synthetic
human skeleton tracking dataset based on OpenPose, iii) multi-camera scenario
for human skeleton tracking in simulation, and iv) a human-robot interaction
example. The key of this work is to create a straightforward pipeline which we
hope will motivate research on new vision-based algorithms and methodologies
for lightweight human-tracking and flexible human-robot applications.
