Kinesthetic Teaching in Robotics: a Mixed Reality Approach

Abstract-- As collaborative robots become more common in manufacturing scenarios and adopted in hybrid human-robot teams, we should develop new interaction and communication strategies to ensure smooth collaboration between agents. In this paper, we propose a novel communicative interface that uses Mixed Reality as a medium to perform Kinesthetic Teaching (KT) on any robotic platform. We evaluate our proposed approach in a user study involving multiple subjects and two different robots, comparing traditional physical KT with holographic-based KT through user experience questionnaires and task-related metrics. Index Terms-- Human-Robot Interaction, Mixed Reality, Kinesthetic Teaching, Software Architecture. In smart factories, robots are expected to coexist and work alongside humans rather than replace them.