Optimizing Setup Configuration of a Collaborative Robot Arm-Based Bimanual Haptic Display for Enhanced Performance

A bimanual haptic display supporting the full range of human arm motion and providing a sufficient haptic feedback force/torque is essential for achieving human-like manipulation in remote or virtual environments. This letter proposes the use of redundant collaborative robot arms as a bimanual haptic display and introduces an optimization scheme to determine its optimal setup configuration. The scheme considers factors including human arm workspace coverage, redundancy, renderable haptic feedback force/torque, and potential collisions with a human arm. The proposed optimization scheme is applied to the Panda and iiwa 7 robot arms and the results are compared to the setup configurations of NimbRo and German Aerospace Center (DLR) HUG. The optimized setup configurations with the proposed scheme were observed to outperform the existing setup configurations.