Development of a 6-DOF robot for haptic interaction with complex virtual environments

Abstract

In the last decade, the design and implementation of robots have taken a turnaround in areas such as haptics and virtual reality. Unlike the big and heavy industrial robots, haptic ones must be light and suitable to be easily handled by an operator. Moreover, they must have enough actuators to allow a realistic haptic interaction with a complex virtual environment. In this work, we present the two phases Research and Development process of a six-degrees-of-freedom haptic robot. In the first phase, we build on our previous work to design a spherical wrist, improving both the mechanics and electronics of an old one. In the second phase, we design a virtual environment consisting of a ball and beam system with which the operator interacts visually and haptically. The basis of our development is the well-known Novint Falcon parallel robot that acts as the first 3-DOF of the resulting device. The rest is completed with our improved spherical wrist, in which a 6-DOF force sensor that measures the interaction forces between the virtual environment and the operator was mounted. Our ultimate goal is to evaluate the usability of the obtained haptic robot and present it as a viable alternative to current commercial devices.