A Low-Cost Experimental Device for Compliant Physical Human-Robot Interaction

Cobotix is one of the latest paradigm changes emerged in the era of modern industrial robotics at the focal point of the so-called Industry 4.0 concept. Safe physical human-robot contact is the core enabling technology and therefore, it has special importance in research and also in education of robotics engineers. This paper introduces a low-cost, yet complete experimental and educational purpose compliant robot that allows for studying the main principles of physical human-robot interaction. The setup consists of a NOVINT Falcon 3-axis haptic device with parallel mechanism and a 3-axis force sensor, which allows for sensing the interaction forces between the robot and the environment. The controller is implemented on a Real-time Linux platform. The resulted software is open source and shared with the robotics community.