Touch: The direct type of human interaction with a redundant service robot

Abstract

The mobile service robots will share their workspaces e.g. offices, hospitals or households with humans. Thus a direct contact between man and machine is inevitable. Robots equipped with appropriate sensors can sense the touch. In this paper we present how an untrained user can intuitively interact with the new DLR light-weight robot just by touching the arm. The robot with 7 dof's will react by an evasiveness motion of the touched links while retaining the orientation of the TCP. This feature can also be used for programming the robot. Programming by "touch" is very intuitive as you take the robot at hand and demonstrate the movements.