A noncontact robot demonstration method with human supervision

The widely used kinesthetic demonstration method of dragging robotic manipulators cannot obtain reliable information for autonomous robot manipulation because an additional external force rather than pure contact force will be reflected on the force sensor in end-constrained manipulation tasks. Therefore, a noncontact robot demonstration method with human supervision is proposed to avoid external influence. A human demonstrator sends motion commands by mouse and observes force data reflected in a monitor to protect the robotic manipulator. Simultaneously, the human demonstrator supervises the position-orientation relationship between the end-effector and the manipulated object. The wrench insertion task is adopted to illustrate the advantage of the proposed method. A contact model is established according to demonstration data acquired from the proposed demonstration method, and an orientation adjustment strategy is verified. The strategy verification experiment illustrates not only the effectiveness of the simplified contact model and corresponding strategy but also the advantage of the proposed demonstration method.