Experimental Comparison of Direct and Indirect Haptic Aids in Support of Obstacle Avoidance for Remotely Piloted Vehicles

The sense of telepresence is known to be essential in teleoperation environments, where the operator is physically separated from the vehicle. Usually only a visual feedback is provided, but it has been shown that by extending the visual interface with haptic feedback, that is complementing the visual information through the sense of touch, the teleoperator has a better perception of information from the remote environment and its constraints. This paper focuses on a novel concept of haptic cueing for an airborne obstacle avoidance task; the novel cueing algorithm was designed to appear ＂natural＂ to the operator, and to improve the human-machine interface without directly acting on the actual aircraft commands. Two different haptic aiding concepts for obstacle avoidance support are presented： an existing and widely used system, belonging to what we called the Direct Haptic Aid （DItA） approach class, and a novel one based on the Indirect Haptic Aid （IHA） approach class. Tests with human operators show that a net improvement in terms of performance （i.e., the number of collisions） is provided by employing the 1HA haptic cue as compared to both the DHA haptic cue and/or the visual cues only. The results clearly show that the IHA philosophy is a valid alternative to the other commonly used approaches, which fall in the DHA category.

Development and Evaluation of a 7-DOF Haptic Interface

With the development of human robot interaction technologies, haptic interfaces are widely used for 3 D applications to provide the sense of touch. These interfaces have been utilized in medical simulation, virtual assembly and remote manipulation tasks. However, haptic interface design and control are still critical problems to reproduce the highly sensitive touch sense of humans. This paper presents the development and evaluation of a7-DOF(degree of freedom) haptic interface based on the modified delta mechanism. Firstly, both kinematics and dynamics of the modified mechanism are analyzed and presented. A novel gravity compensation algorithm based on the physical model is proposed and validated in simulation. A haptic controller is proposed based on the forward kinematics and the gravity compensation algorithm. To evaluate the control performance of the haptic interface, a prototype has been implemented. Three kinds of experiments: gravity compensation, static response and force tracking are performed respectively. The experimental results show that the mean error of the gravity compensation is less than 0.7 N and the maximum continuous force along the axis can be up to 6 N. This demonstrates the good performance of the proposed haptic interface.

Haptic Interface with Magnetic Field Sensitive Elastomer

Sense of touch is one of the important information from environment for human to live in daily life. Haptic interface is a hot topic in virtual reality but almost all of the devices focus on fingers and hands as targets. In this paper, we focus on the foot haptic device with magnetic flied sensitive elastomer （MSE）. We developed a haptic unit used as a magnetic field generator for MSE and contact point of foot haptic device. MSE samples mixed with 80 wt% carbonyl iron particles were prepared and evaluated with the developed magnet. Experimental results show that the mechanical property of the haptic unit can be modeled with the adjustable friction element. This property has a good advantage for the haptic unit.

Controller Design for a 3 D.O.F Haptic Interface Device

This paper presents a 3 D.O.F haptic interface which is designed to meet the interaction requirement of teleoperation tasks and virtual reality applications. The mechanism design takes the operability into consideration such as adopting steel cable as transmission component and mass balance to eliminate the gravity effect. The dynamics of haptic interface including actuating device is studied. In order to provide operator with fidelity kinesthetic information, a force controller using self-learning fuzzy logic control is designed. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the control method.

Analysis and Performance Evaluation of a Modular Finger-Mounted Haptic Device for High-Density Feedback

The utilization of high-resolution haptic feedback devices in a virtual reality(VR)environment can increase the precision of controlling remotely operated vehicles and reduce training costs for subsea construction operations.This paper introduces a novel flexible-driven wearable pin-array device.The spatial separation of the control box and actuator allows the device to attain natural and seamless interactive movements while delivering high-density haptic feedback in VR.The pin array consists of 25 haptic pin modules that run on a linear servo motor via a flexible shaft for force transmission.The analysis and calculation of the flexible transmission resistance effect using the haptic pin module's shaft length and bending radius were conducted.A series of experiments was performed to gather comprehensive data on the pin module's output,transmission resistance and error,and response delay to optimize its structural design and transmission strategy.The device's effectiveness in rendering shape and coarse texture was evaluated via two user studies.The results affirm that the introduced device enables users to precisely discern seven shapes and four distinct coarse surfaces.

Robot Position Control Using Force Information for Cooperative Work in Remote Robot Systems with Force Feedback

This paper proposes robot position control using force information for cooperative work between two remote robot systems with force feedback in each of which a user operates a remote robot by using a haptic interface device while observing work of the robot with a video camera. We also investigate the effect of the proposed control by experiment. As cooperative work, we deal with work in which two robots carry an object together. The robot position control using force information finely adjusts the position of the robot arm to reduce the force applied to the object. Thus, the purpose of the control is to avoid large force so that the object is not broken. In our experiment, we make a comparison among the following three cases in order to clarify how to carry out the control effectively. In the first case, the two robots are operated manually by a user with his/her both hands. In the second case, one robot is operated manually by a user, and the other robot is moved automatically under the proposed control. In the last case, the object is carried directly by a human instead of the robot which is operated by the user in the second case. As a result, experimental results demonstrate that the control can help each system operated manually by the user to carry the object smoothly.

Funabot-Suit:A bio-inspired and McKibben muscle-actuated suit for natural kinesthetic perception

In recent years,there has been extensive utilization of actuators driven by artificial muscles in wearable devices.However,the muscle distribution configurations of most wearable devices have been specifically designed and are difficult to generalize.Consequently,wearable devices that allow direct installation of actuators onto existing clothing are better suited for a wider range of application scenarios.This letter presents the development and evaluation of Funabot-Suit,a human muscle configuration inspired wearable assist device that employs McKibben artificial muscles to induce natural kinesthetic perception in the wearer’s torso.By integrating thin McKibben muscles into an existing motion capture suit,the Funabot-Suit is capable of generating four fundamental motions:forward and backward bending,and left and right twisting.The suit’s performance was assessed through experiments involving three subjects who wore the suit while standing and seated,with the subjects reporting the direction of their kinesthetic perception.The subjects also rated the perceived ease of kinesthetic perception direction on a five-point scale.Our results demonstrate that the Funabot-Suit successfully induces kinesthetic perceptions for the wearer,with a one hundred percent detection ratio for accurate responses in the command direction across all subjects and positions.We observed variations in the sensitivity of left–right and up-down sensations,which can be attributed to the positioning of artificial muscles and individual differences.