Safety in a Human Robot Interactive: Application to Haptic Perception

Usually, traditional haptic interfaces, such as Virtuose 6DOF [1], are used in the design phases by engineers [2]. Such interfaces are safe. However, the user can apply a force/torque but cannot really feel textures and appreciate material quality. These interfaces have a limited workspace, low stiffness and are very expensive. New haptic interfaces using an industrial robots or a cobot (robots specially designed to work in Human-Robot environments) can be used as a haptic interface with intermittent contacts [3, 4]. For application considered in this paper, the cobot carries several specimens of texture on its end-effector, to allow contact between a finger of the user and the robot.