Introduction of a Cobot as Intermittent Haptic Contact Interfaces in Virtual Reality.

Virtual reality (VR) is evolving and being used in industrial simulations, but the possibility to touch objects is missing, for example, to judge the perceived quality in the design of a car. Current haptic interfaces do not make it possible to easily restore texture, therefore an approach is considered as an intermittent contact interface to achieve this. A cobot places a moving surface at the point of contact with a virtual object in order to enable physical contact with the hand of the operator. This paper aims to speak about several challenges: the placement of the robot, the modeling of the operator, the management of the displacement and the speed of the robot, and the detection of the operator’s intentions. The placement of the robot is chosen to allow reaching the different working areas and to ensure passive safety by making it impossible for the robot to hit the head and chest of the operator in a normal working position, i.e. sitting in a chair. A user model, consisting of a torso and arms, is designed and tested to track the user’s movements in real-time. Interaction is possible with a set of pre-defined poses that the user follows together as desired. Various strategies are proposed to predict the intent of the user. The main aspects of prediction are based on the direction of the eye and the position of the hand of the user. An experimental study as well as the resulting analysis demonstrates the contribution by considering the direction of the gaze. The advantage of introducing “safety” points to move the robot away from the operator and allow rapid movements of the robot is emphasized.