A Visuo-Haptic Guidance Interface for Mobile Collaborative Robotic Assistant (MOCA)

Abstract

In this work, we propose a novel visuo-haptic guidance interface to enable mobile collaborative robots to follow human instructions in a way understandable by nonexperts. The interface is composed of a haptic admittance module and a human visual tracking module. The haptic guidance enables an individual to guide the robot end-effector in the workspace to reach and grasp arbitrary items. The visual interface, on the other hand, uses a real-time human tracking system and enables autonomous and continuous navigation of the mobile robot towards the human, with the ability to avoid static and dynamic obstacles along its path. To ensure a safer human-robot interaction, the visual tracking goal is set outside of a certain area around the human body, entering which will switch robot behaviour to the haptic mode. The execution of the two modes is achieved by two different controllers, the mobile base admittance controller for the haptic guidance and the robot's whole-body impedance controller, that enables physically coupled and controllable locomotion and manipulation. The proposed interface is validated experimentally, where a human-guided robot performs the loading and transportation of a heavy object in a cluttered workspace, illustrating the potential of the proposed Follow-Me interface in removing the external loading from the human body in this type of repetitive industrial tasks.

A Human-Aware Method to Plan Complex Cooperative and Autonomous Tasks using Behavior Trees

“…MOCA is a robotics research platform made of a torque-controlled redundant manipulator mounted on top of a velocity-controlled mobile base. It is controlled by means of a Cartesian weighted wholebody impedance controller [7], [11] that executes smooth polynomial Cartesian trajectories. The depicted task is the 9: Experimental setup.…”

“…The experimental setup is depicted in Figure 9. To track human pose and skeleton joint positions in real-time, we placed an RGB-D camera, an Intel RealSense D435i, fixed in the workcell, running OpenPose [29], similar to [11]. Thanks to the skeleton tracker, it was possible to account for human presence in the work-cell, automatizing the change of the cost weights.…”

“…The examples include logistics [6]- [8] and manufacturing [9] scenarios. The mobility of such systems allows to exploit their loco-manipulation capabilities to ensure safe human-robot collaboration, through intuitive interfaces that allow the human operators to interact with the robot [10], [11]. Nevertheless, such interfaces should not only allow to regulate the interaction at the control level but also adapt robot behavior to human intentions, actions and preferences.…”

MOCA-S: A Sensitive Mobile Collaborative Robotic Assistant exploiting Low-Cost Capacitive Tactile Cover and Whole-Body Control

“…The second controller is an expanded whole-body admittance controller that builds on the haptic follow-me controller of our previous work presented in [26]. An illustration of the behavior of the robot thanks to this controller when an external force is applied to the base is shown in Fig.…”

TelePhysicalOperation: Remote Robot Control Based on a Virtual “Marionette” Type Interaction Interface

“…coupled to the robot (through a mechanical admittance interface) to perform conjoined actions. MOCA robot is present again in [19], where an haptic guidance is performed to physically drive the arm to grasp the wanted object.…”