Commanding Grasping Robot through Virtual Reality and Simulated Wrenches

Chapter 1 Introduction Literature proposes a multitude of studies involving the use of robots for teleoper- ation in industrial and medical applications. Recent studies propose the manipulation of objects through multi-agent interaction on the same object through miniaturized tac- tile devices [1, 2]. These solutions rise to technological development aimed at providing technical and scientic advancement in the eld of remote manipulation [3]. Despite the numerous recent developments, the robot teleoperation still requires a direct vision of the environment, through cameras, in which the robotic part provides occlusion and operational problems (e.g time delay, high cognitive burden to control the robot [53]) which aect many applications in both medical and industrial elds [4,5]. In this study is proposed a dierent strategy by introducing an innovative experimental setting aimed to overcome the cited problems. More in detail, a new experimental system is proposed to create a more suitable virtual- to-real environment interconnection in order to eciently support the communication of the data from the real part, where the robot agent operates, to the virtual one monitored by the user. The real environment is approximated with a completely virtual one. In this hypothesis, several physical models can be manipulated by a robotic system with which they can interact through preset mathematical models. However, the virtual counterpart, replicates the information necessary for the user to view and control the physical parts and the robot. The operator himself interacts towards the real environment through the information provided from the virtual environment where the robotic part is omitted by design, in order to minimize the occlusion and visual issues. 1.1 The Development of the Project Virtual reality provides the possibility to receive a visual feedback and allows the user to train with the surrounding environment. However, challenges are still present due to the dierence between the poor quality and quantity of haptic sensation obtained through virtual interaction and the full sensation obtained through physical interaction [11]. The human can perceive in the physical world more properties such as stiness, rough- ness, temperature of the objects, or deformation of objects. Discrepancies regarding the perception of the physics could lead to wrong decisions from the user side. To grasp virtual objects is considered one of the most complex tasks in Virtual Reality 1