Kinesthetic Robot Force Response enhanced by the Laws of Physics

A popular approach to intuitive robot programming is kinesthetic guiding, where the user leads the robot through a task providing a trajectory for automatized replication. While the flow of information from the user towards the robot is already well explored, the feedback from the robot to the user within the same modality is often neglected. In this work we present an innovative concept, how the robot can state an imminent collision based on an adaptive virtual kinetic friction force. Our approach features both obstacle indication and collision avoidance without additional output devices. A user study motivates certain requirements for the provided feedback, whose fulfillment is demonstrated by numerical experiments.