Abstract
This paper describes a haptic device with a single degree of freedom (DOF) that can be used for remote controlled assembly in 6DOFs. Most haptic devices have 6 DOFs for higher sense of reality. However, for assembly operations, motion of parts with only one or two DOFs is required simultaneously and force feedbacks to operators are used only for maintaining contacts and detecting collisions among parts. This leads to a possibility of assembly operations using a haptic device with a small number of DOFs. For this purpose, we have proposed the concept of 'virtual plane' to separate DOFs that the user manipulates and the DOFs that the system controls. To evaluate this idea, we have designed and developed a mouse-type single DOF haptic device with a torque sensor. A remote controlled system is also proposed where the developed device is used to control a 6 DOFs manipulator.
