Application of Haptic Virtual Fixtures on Hot-Line Work Robot-Assisted Manipulation

This paper presents a teleoperation system combines with force feedback. The teleoperation system is mainly composed of the 6-DOF Geomagic Touch haptic device, the simulation environment and the 6-DOF UR5 manipulator. We analyzed the forward kinematics of master and slave manipulators, then we calculated the workspace of the UR5 arms. The slave manipulator is controlled by using incremental displacement and incremental rotation strategies in a space Cartesian coordinate system. Creating virtual fixtures is a way to reduce operator error and guide operator to complete tasks efficiently in teleoperation. So we built the virtual environment in simulation software based on the real environment, used a certain length of angle steel as a dangerous area in live working of distribution network, and a forbidden-region virtual fixture was established to avoid the collision of the manipulator with the steel. We tested the delay and accuracy of the system through experiments. In addition, we verified the feasibility of the designed virtual fixture.