Path planning methods are well suited to automatically perform robotic tasks; haptic guidance is a powerful tool for disabled people rehabilitation, sports training, handcraft skills acquiring and such kind of enactive tasks. This paper proposes a novel an efficient method to accomplish guided movements by efficiently combing path planning methods and haptic guidance. The main contribution of this paper is the development of a reliable method to haptically guide the user within a virtual robotic task, by means of: on-line, collision free, path planning generated trajectories. To accomplish haptic guidance three stages must be correctly done: the first one where the user selects the desired objects and obstacles within a virtual environment to set up the task, the second one, where a path planner looks for the task trajectory and, the third one, where the user is constrained to on-line generated local channels and solution paths that offer a reliable path guidance system to achieve the task movements.

Peer Reviewed