Cobify is a simple Unity 3D Plugin that enables quick robot prototyping for Haptics in VR without using ROS bridges, just plug and play.

Haptics increase the presence in virtual reality applications. However, providing room-scale haptics is an open challenge. Cobots (robotic systems that are safe for human use) are a promising approach, requiring in-depth engineering skills. Control is done on a low abstraction level and requires complex procedures and implementations. In contrast, 3D tools such as Unity allow to quickly prototype a wide range of environments for which cobots could deliver haptic feedback. To overcome this disconnect, we present Cobity, an open-source plug-and-play solution to control the cobot using the virtual environment, enabling fast prototyping of a wide range of haptic experiences. We present a Unity plugin that allows controlling the cobot using the end-effector's target pose (cartesian position and angles); the values are then converted into velocities and streamed to the cobot inverse kinematic solver using a specially designed C++ library. Our results show that Cobity enables rapid prototyping with high precision for haptics. We argue that Cobity simplifies the creation of a wide range of haptic feedback applications enabling designers and researchers in human-computer interaction without robotics experience to quickly prototype virtual reality experiences with haptic sensations. We highlight this potential by presenting four different show cases.

• Kinova ultra-lightweight Gen3
• Kinova ultra-lightweight Gen3 Lite

• Universal Robots UR# Series

• Kinova Kortex API
• Protocol Buffer

The unityPackage includes all the required files to run the code in your project. Just import it and add it to you scene.

Move the robot by introducing values in the target position field. Please be aware that these values represent meters (m).

Before using the unity world-coordinates please align your real robot with the virtual one, so the measurements from the robot encoder are consistent with the virtual model.

Building the library manually is required if you want to alter any of the provided functions. In order to do so, please follow these simple instructions:

Disclaimer: The current project was developed and and tested only using MS Visual Studio 2019 (and consequently Windows).

Download this repository to you computer, make sure that you have correctly installed and built the Kortex Examples

Then, use the GUI (ccmake or cmake-gui) to set the Kortex API path, or specify it on the cmake command line:

cmake -DKORTEX_DIR:STRING=<PATH_TO_KORTEX_LIBRARY>

Please note that you have to specify the full path until "include" libraries, for example:

cmake -DKORTEX_DIR:STRING="Users/<USER_NAME>/.conan/data/kortex_api_cpp/<LIB_VERSION>/kortex/stable/package/<PACKAGE_CODE>"

then run

cmake install

If you have any feature request please contact us via the GitHub issues tracker.

This work can be cited as follows:

@inproceedings{villa2022cobity,
title = {Cobity: A Plug-And-Play Toolbox to Deliver Haptics in Virtual Reality},
author = {Villa, Steeven and Mayer, Sven},
url = {https://github.com/xteeven/Cobity},
doi = {10.1145/3543758.3543775},
year = {2022},
booktitle = {Proceedings of Mensch Und Computer 2022},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {Darmstadt, Germany},
series = {MuC'22}
}