Haptic Rendering of Arbitrary Serial Manipulators for Robot Programming

This video belongs to the paper "Haptic Rendering of Arbitrary Serial Manipulators for Robot Programming", which is accepted for publication in the IEEE Control Systems Letters. In the video, the motivation and the basic idea of the paper are presented. Subsequently, the video gives a demonstration combining three different VR/AR devices with the three exemplary robots, that were introduced in the paper. Authors: Michael Fennel, Antonio Zea, Johannes Mangler, Arne Roennau, Uwe D. Hanebeck Keywords: Haptics, Robotics, Control, Human-in-the-loop, Automation, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality Abstract/Summary of the original publication: 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.