Instructing a Dual Arm Cobot Deploying Virtual Reality and Programming by Demonstration

Robots are a crucial tool for a lot of industrial applications and, due to this, these machines are used for repetitive task in a lot of companies in many markets around the world. Because of the advantages that new robot models ensure, the density of this kind of workers increase every day. All these robots need to be programmed and adjusted before starting to work or because of variations in the application. This programming or adjustment processes generate a high con-sume in terms of effort, money and time from the resources of the company, plus the necessity of an expert programmer for these tasks. This level of consume of the company resources is the justification for a research project like this that have the objective to generate a solution. This solution will allow non expert users to program these robots through simple task demonstration examples over a virtual world, avoiding the necessity of the real workspace for this programming process while improving the program-ming cycle time. To achieve this objective some new incipient technologies likes dual arm collaborative robots and virtual reality are combined with the use of Programming by Demonstration methods. Dual arm collaborative robots combine the advantages from both dual arm and collaborative ones. Some of these advantages are multitasking, human movements easy reproduction, and cycle time improvement. Virtual Reality is a growing technology recently introduce to the great public market with inexpensive hardware options helped by the actual development of the personal com-puter performance too. A programming by demonstration simple method was implemented as well as a wireless TCP/IP bidirectional connection between virtual reality and the robot. The user has different ways to interact with the virtual environment thanks to the use of the hand tracking controllers and the user interface implemented. The matching properties between both virtual reality and real workspaces is a really important aspect to achieve to ensure high level of precision. The results of the testing process show a fast and smooth operation of both virtual and robotics parts of the project while the robot is able to follow all the movements and grabbing operations done by the user. Limited results in terms of synchronism and precision are obtained caused by the decision of using human hands instead of robot grippers in virtual reality environment and the use of robot simulation instead of the actual robot. However, the application generated is a good base for future works, in either a simple rigid task improving the current application or for a more complex flexible task teaching method