VR & AR HAPTIC TECHNOLOGY
FEELING THE
FUTURE OF
ROBOTIC
CONTROL
Now VR and AR are established in
several vertical markets, the next
stage is adding haptic feedback.
By Elliot Mulley-Goodbarne
Immersive Reality may be struggling
to penetrate the consumer world, but
across industry it is becoming well
established.
Manufacturers, for example, are
now finding uses for the technology
including the way it can assist
employees to diagnose potential
problems, record their progress
during training or reduce wastage
and increase the quality of assembly,
lengthening the life of machines.
Such use cases were established
and detailed in ARC advisory group
digital transformation analyst Will
Hasting’s 2018 report into the use of
AR in manufacturing and now it seems
the focus, in terms of innovation, has
shifted from the ability to see to the
ability to see and feel.
Sectors leading the way include
defence, with bomb disposal robots,
aerospace, for maintenance work
and ceramics, looking to improve the
quality of the end product.
Another area in which haptic
and virtual reality is in demand is
in healthcare, allowing the ability to
train surgeons before operating on
patients. Richard Vincent, founder and
CEO of FundamentalVR said, “Where
we seek to get our technology to is to
create haptics, which give the sensory
clues that you need to change your
behaviour in a surgical procedure.”
FundamentalVR provides a
replication of a number of surgical
procedures through Microsoft, Vive or
Oculus VR headsets and two geomatic
haptic arms in order to give students
a sense of the different forces needed
to carry out an operation. These
procedures are built on a gaming
engine provided by UnityVR with
FundamentalVR’s own R&D team
incorporating the feedback through the
geomatic arms.
“Whether it’s reaming where you
can feel the surface that’s starting to
change and so change your behaviour
or whether it’s a pedicle screw, where
you have to feel the inside of the
channel at the back, we can achieve
those clues, changing behaviour.”
Elsewhere, in manufacturing,
Unity Studios Aps chief design
officer Thomas Fenger explained that
companies are now interested in
using haptic response systems and,
in particular, VR and AR to make sure
production runs smoothly.
“Right now, companies that deliver
industrial robots are branching into
using AR/VR for controls.
“Mostly I see this as sort of the
pre-installation of the controls. We
have already seen ABB using virtual
reality to be able to set up controller
robots in a digital copy of the sort of
the environment that they come to
use.
“The idea is to not interrupt
production. The operator will set up
Above:
FundamentalVR uses
haptics to improve
the experience for
surgeons using VR in
surgical procedures
the procedures that the robot will
follow and can pre-simulate without
actually interrupting processes. That’s
probably where we see the most
benefit right now.”
True replication
The challenge that system developers
are now facing is replicating true
interaction through robotics. According
to Professor Robert Stone, Director
of the Human Interface technologies
team and Emeritus Professor, XR
and Telepresence at the University of
Birmingham, these technologies have
not developed much from systems in
the 90s.
“We saw a lot of early VR
applications using master slave
manipulators from the nuclear
industry and for a long time, people
were asking if these things could
be adapted. Even the original
exoskeletons in the 1960s were being
looked at as a means by which you
could interact more intuitively with
virtual worlds.
“It’s only recently that haptics
has come to the fore because a lot
of people are coming out with quite
outlandish products but, when you
look at these products, very little
has changed since the 90s. We’re
still looking at pneumatics and at
electromechanical devices that are
built in pulley-like systems that restrict
or restrain the movements of the
hand or arm’; we’re still looking at
exoskeletons.
“The big issue from my perspective,
as a human factor specialist, is that
we are still in the position today where
there is not one system, be it the
robotics, or VR that is able to satisfy
all the needs of the sensors that are
built into our fingertips, the skin of the
fingers, the muscles, the tendons. It’s
still incredibly primitive.”
“The important thing with touch
is that everyone feels things slightly
differently” added Vincent, “I feel
a table surface and say it’s quite
smooth, you might say it’s a bit rough.
Neither of us are wrong but the point
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