Advances in VR-techniques for robot simulation and control

The paper will describe new methods of graphical robot simulation and control by using Virtual Reality techniques. The objectives of the research work at IPA Stuttgart are to improve the man-machine-interface to robot simulation systems and to robot control systems. Therefore a suitable testbed was developed to evaluate simulation concepts for industrial robots such as off-line programming, off-line teaching and robot teleoperation. In this test surrounding, the operator wearing a headmounted stereo display is able to act in a virtual world. The movements of head and hand are tracked by sensors and included in the simulation in realtime. By means of gestures with the dataglove and control commands given by a 6D-sensorball, the operator can move within the virtual world without having to leave his real location. Using the dataglove the operators hand movements can directly be converted into robot path data for a virtual robot. Moreover an interface towards the real robot enables the ope rator's movements to be directly transferred to the industrial robot (PUMA 560 with VAL II) via dataglove. In this way any path in all 6 degrees of freedom can be generated in realtime. Conventional teachpanels and time consuming path programming of the robot are unnecessary. Different to conventional graphical simulations, high requirements to the rendering system performance have to be fullfilled. This adresses especially the frame rate of such a simulation system, e.g. 15 pictures per second have to be achieved to perform a dynamic impression of the virtual world. For that reason, IPA Stuttgart developed a new rendering system, providing the required performance. An advanced data structure allows a selection of the data to be displayed on the stereo display by means of a particular simplification of the geometric objects. In order to reduce the complexity of the CAD model, parts of it will be represented in reduced complexity with bounding boxes. An algorithm controls the rendering