Incorporating contact sensing in virtual environment for robotic applications

Many robotic tasks involve dynamic interaction between the work piece and handling device, in which sensory information constitutes an indispensable part of the task. It is therefore of practical interest to incorporate sensor modules in the simulation stage to provide a more realistic preview of the operation and predict the behavior of the components prior to the implementation on a real work cell. Most of the current virtual reality (VR) systems use geometric models and sensorless robots for simulation, which cannot provide the insight into the real behavior of the work cell components. In this paper, we report our work in studying the issues related to simulated sensors for dynamic interaction in virtual environment (VE) using physics based models. Based on previous development, a simplified force sensor is modeled and simulated. The current implementation was carried out on a PC based VR platform, with the low-level programs developed using C via the systems development interface (SDK).