An Intuitive Manual Guidance Scheme to Operate Rotation and Translation Simultaneously

During certain human-robot collaboration tasks, the operator interacts with the robot by hand guidance to adjust the end-effector pose for spatial operations. The rotational operation is less intuitive to humans than translation. In fact, imagining the path to the target orientation is more challenging. In the literature related to control strategies for robot manual guidance, it is usually proposed to control translation and rotation independently. Our research explored and quantified the factors that influence operational intuition. A Virtual Fixture spatial guidance framework with intuition maintenance is proposed. This novel guidance scheme enables operators to effortlessly and simultaneously control both orientation and position in an intuitive way. High operation precision and efficiency can be achieved without interfering with the main task by exploring the null space with constraint optimization.