Development of a Virtual Reality Application for the Assessment of Human-Robot Collaboration Tasks

The combination of Virtual Reality (VR) systems and advanced control strategies represent a winning approach to improve the Human Robot Collaboration (HRC) in industrial applications: both safety and ease of development and tuning of control parameters are achievable, responding to recent industrial needs of productivity and flexibility, and at the same time ergonomics for operators. In this paper it is described a VR application used to asses a control strategy for collision avoidance developed by the authors for the redundant collaborative robot KUKA iiwa LBR. The robot kinematics is virtually modelled, whereas the obstacle is a virtual copy of the controller which is manually moved by the operator. Spatial coordinates of the controller, i.e. the obstacle, are available in real time and can be used to update the motion of the robot in order to avoid a potential collision. The effectiveness of the method, demonstrated by the presented test case, suggests further developments in order to simulate real industrial applications and integrate other types of sensors to improve the system capabilities.