Safe Collaboration Between Human and Robot in a Context of Intermittent Haptique Interface

Abstract

In the list of interfaces used to make virtual reality, haptic interfaces allow users to touch a virtual world with their hands. Traditionally, the user’s hand touches the end effector of a robotic arm. When there is no contact, the robotic arm is passive; when there is contact, the arm suppresses mobility to the user’s hand in certain directions. Unfortunately, the passive mode is never completely seamless to the user. Haptic interfaces with intermittent contacts are interfaces using industrial robots that move towards the user when contact needs to be made. As the user is immersed via a virtual reality Head Mounted Display (HMD), he cannot perceive the danger of a collision when he changes his area of interest in the virtual environment. The objective of this article is to describe movement strategies for the robot to be as fast as possible on the contact zone while guaranteeing safety. This work uses the concept of predicting the position of the user through his gaze direction and the position of his dominant hand (the one touching the object). A motion generation algorithm is proposed and then applied to a UR5 robot with an HTC vive tracker system for an industrial application involving the analysis of materials in the interior of a car.

Improving Haptic Response for Contextual Human Robot Interaction

“…The most commonly used approach depends on finding the object closest to the hand. Implementation was carried out by computing the distances from the hand to all points of interest in search space, as used in [37], or, alternatively, by searching through a k-d tree, as used in [5]. In this study, we used a k-d tree to store the positions of all objects in the scene.…”

“…While these issues may be partly solved by improving device hardware, factors such as cost, safety, and complexity often lead to design decisions that make device workspace and speed constraints unavoidable. Control approaches from the state-of-the-art, such as hapticretargeting [2] and user motion prediction, have been employed to address speed and latency issues [5]. Our study addresses this problem through motion prediction using the human eye-gaze tracking and hand motion.…”

Trajectory planning in Dynamics Environment : Application for Haptic Perception in Safe HumanRobot Interaction

“…The system will receive a desired goal configuration which will be the q goal for the planning algorithm, from the current q init configuration. This goal selection is done in Unity by a Point selection algorithm which determines the interaction point the user intends to reach [26] (Figure 11).…”

“…The first scenario is based on [26] where a distinction for velocity zones is made and where a plane divides the environment (space with the user and space where the user cannot go).Based on the same idea, we represented the effective working space of the mannequin as a sphere surrounding the model (Figure 12). The mobility scheme consists of alternating between different "Safe positions".…”

“…We wait until we know the position we want to reach. Unlike [26], we have used a spherical surface here to divide the two areas of the space instead of a plane, as this allows greater flexibility for the planning group to consider more configurations when calculating the path between points. It also allows for more feasible trajectories for the robot.…”