Haptic interface for force/motion controlled mobile manipulator

Abstract

Abstract: The experiment shows how a robotic platform with force and motion control capabilities, coupled with a haptic device, could be of significant improvement to an industrial task. Shown here is a task involving a polishing job of an aircraft canopy with unknown surface. This paper proposed leaving the low level task of maintaining constant contact force and good compliance to the canopy surface to the robot, while keeping the high level intelligence to be provided by the human. This is done by connecting the force/motion capabilities of the robot to the human operator through a haptic interface. The resulting setup enabled the haptic device to reflect the contour of the surface that was in contact of the manipulator, while the manipulator performed a force control task. Stiffness of the surface was made an indicator to the performance of the force control.