A novel haptic display based on curvature estimation and its application to a machining support robot

For finish processing of limited-production diversified products of complex shapes, the use of a bilaterally controlled robot is in some sense inevitable. However, a bilateral control system is very difficult to operate because a worker must be in constant contact with the slave tool. So, in this paper, we propose a method to show the shape of the workpiece from the estimated curvatures of its parts. In addition, we have built a support system for processing that is specifically adapted to the proposed method. The system consists of a 6-DOF parallel haptic device as the master robot and 4-DOF parallel robot as the slave robot. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through three different experiments.