Artificial and natural force constraints in haptic-aided path planning

The paper presents novel extensions of the notion of artificial and natural constraints which have been used in force and position control of robotic devices to the new paradigm of haptic-aided design. In particular, the preliminary results of this paper show how the user can interact with the virtual CAD environment in solving various path planning problems where traditional approaches may fail in converging to a solution. Here, the representations of objects are mapped into various force fields where the user can define a path from an initial configuration to a goal configuration. A novel methodology is also proposed where the linear force fields combined with the geometrical constraints can be used to guide the user to accomplish a desired spatial rotation of the object in the task space. This is important in most cases where the haptic devices are only capable in generating linear force fields as opposed to full six degrees of freedom fields. Some examples are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed methods.