Offline Direct Teaching for a Robotic Manipulator in the Computational Space

This paper proposes a robot teaching method using augmented and virtual reality technologies. Robot teaching is essential for robots to accomplish several tasks in industrial production. Although there are various approaches to perform motion planning for robot manipulation, robot teaching is still required for precision and reliability. Online teaching, in which a physical robot moves in the real space to obtain the desired motion, is widely performed because of its ease and reliability. However, actual robot movements are required. In contrast, offline teaching can be accomplished entirely in the computational space, and it requires constructing the robot’s surroundings as computer graphic models. Additionally, planar displays do not provide sufficient information on 3D scenes. Our proposed method can be employed as offline teaching, but the operator can manipulate the robot intuitively using a head-mounted device and the specified controllers in the virtual 3D space. We demonstrate two approaches for robot teaching with augmented and virtual reality technologies and show some experimental results.