Recent research in WP 3-2 of HUTOP Project-haptic interface and programless image inspection

Two topics from the Work Package 3-2 of HUTOP Project are introduced. One is a haptic interface to realize intuitive communication between human and machine. Gesture and touch feeling play important parts in our daily life as nonverbal media for emotional human communication. Therefore, it is important and effective to introduce haptic and gesture interface into production processes such as display, design, modeling, teaching and control. We proposed a hand-shaped force interface for the autonomous mobile robot that is designed to take physical communication with the user via haptic/force interaction in the first part of the paper. The second half of the paper describes a new type of visual inspection system. When inspection equipment based on visual recognition is integrated in a production site, the recognition logic is custom designed to satisfy the specific inspection specification, normally requiring constant attention and recognition program modifications by specialty engineers. In order to improve the situation, this paper proposes a "Programless (programming-free) visual recognition technology", a core technology used in inspection equipment that can autonomously improve recognition algorithm by feeding human know-how back into the system.