Visuo-tactile Mixed Reality for Offline Cobot Programming

Abstract

Manual guidance of a collaborative robot arm (i.e., moving the robot arm by hand) is a technique to program the robot without coding and in the context of the job. However, it requires the robot to be available and not in operation. As a workaround, we propose performing manual guidance on a hologram of that same robot, the feasibility of which we are investigating. A potential limitation of this approach is the lack of tangibility of the hologram, for which we are investigating the contribution that mid-air haptics (MAH) can make. Early results suggest beneficial effects from tactile feedback on AR pick-and-place.