Human-Scale Bimanual Haptic Interface

Abstract

This article presents a haptic system for bimanual haptic feedback that is composed of two light-weight robot arms. The system has a workspace and force capabilities similar to that of two human arms. Sophisticated control strategies are implemented to enable using this system as haptic interface. Depending on the requirements of the task one of three different handles can connect the human hand to the robot. Besides the human-machine-interface, the haptic rendering software is improved such that collisions of two dynamical interaction objects are computed in real-time. The system has been proven to be well suited as haptic interface for multimodal virtual assembly simulations.