Intuitive Manipulation of Delta Robot Using Leap Motion

Delta robots are parallel manipulators used extensively in industries to perform pick-and-place and sorting operations. While the latter is usually integrated with a vision system, the former requires users to teach robot positions and corresponding actions that it has to repeatedly follow, using teach pendants. The teach pendants are generally bulky and require thorough training to be used upon. In this paper, the authors propose usage of Leap Motion, a hand tracking device, to manipulate a delta robot. The kinematics of the robot and the methodology used to integrate Leap Motion and the manipulator developed by them are presented in this paper. The robot was successfully controlled, and it was found to be intuitive for the end-user.