Haptic Rendering of Arbitrary Serial Manipulators for Robot Programming

Abstract

The programming of manipulators is a common task in robotics, for which numerous solutions exist. In this work, a new programming method related to the common master-slave approach is introduced, in which the master is replaced by a digital twin created through haptic and visual rendering. To achieve this, we present an algorithm that enables the haptic rendering of any programmed robot with a serial manipulator on a general-purpose haptic interface. The results show that the proposed haptic rendering reproduces the kinematic properties of the programmed robot and directly provides the desired joint space trajectories. In addition to a stand-alone usage, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can be easily paired with existing visual technology for virtual and augmented reality to facilitate a highly immersive programming experience.

Shaping the role of the digital twins for human‐robot dyad: Connotations, scenarios, and future perspectives

“…Through DTs, haptic technologies can provide tactile feedback for virtual interaction with physical entities. This feature can be used in unlimited applications, such as robot programming [57], robot teleoperation, and collision avoidance.…”

“…Various articles selected Unity as their development platform since it easily allows the integration of VR and AR through their MixedReality Toolkit [55]. Moreover, Unity seems to have a pragmatic advantage over other tools as it is compatible with ROS [21, 33, 57, 61], MATLAB [33], and Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools [2, 44].…”

“…Moreover, Unity seems to have a pragmatic advantage over other tools as it is compatible with ROS [21,33,57,61], MATLAB [33], and Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools [2,44].…”

“…Similarly, Liang et al [43] use the iso camera to find the robot control policy of the construction task with the Trust Region Policy Gradient method. Other emerging hardware components in DT-HRI literature are Haptics [33,49,57] and Radio Frequency Identification [47]. However, they are scarcely utilised in the current literature but could shape an interesting direction for future research.…”

“…[ 38,41] Screen display Control [29,44,45,55,57,58] XR -Control using XR-based HMD is used to provide an immersive and interaction with HRI-DTs in the following activities: a. Teleoperation of the robot [44]. b.…”