PbD: Visual Guidance for Robot-Arm Manipulation

Grigori Evreinov^*, Roope Raisamo^*, Thomas Hulin^† and Uwe Zimmerman^‡

^(*) University of Tampere, Finland
^(†) DLR (German Aerospace Center), Germany
^(‡) KUKA Laboratories, Germany
E-mail: grse@cs.uta.fi, rr@cs.uta.fi, Thomas.Hulin@dlr.de, Uwe.Zimmerman@kuka.com

Abstract

Robot control requires comprehending the workspace and limitations of the complex multi-joint robotic system. The structure of visual guidance system accompanying the training scenario affects the efficiency of eye-hand coordination and decision making of how to avoid and compensate for a situation of crash functioning when operators should directly move the robot arm to the desired position.

We have demonstrated that the use of the visual guidance in a form of semi-transparent virtual image (phantom) indicating the right robot-arm configuration enabled trainees to achieve significant improvements in the target acquisition task. Their cumulative motor experience1 was increased by 1.8 times, while only by 1.2 times under the passive learning condition.