Haptic Guidance for Extended Range Telepresence

A novel navigation assistance for extended range telepresence is presented. The haptic information from the target environment is augmented with guidance commands to assist the user in reaching desired goals in the arbitrarily large target environment from the spatially restricted user environment. Furthermore, a semi-mobile haptic interface was developed, one whose lightweight design and setup configuration atop the user provide for an absolutely safe operation and high force display quality

Nonlinear Control Techniques for Robot Manipulators

This Masters thesis describes the design and implementation of control strategies for the following topics of research: i) Whole Arm Grasping Control for Redundant Robot Manipulators, ii) Neural Network Grasping Controller for Continuum Robots and, iii) Coordination Control for Haptic and Teleoperator Systems. An approach to whole arm grasping of objects using redundant robot manipulators is presented. A kinematic control which facilitates the encoding of both the end-effector position, as well as body self-motion positioning information as a desired trajectory signal for the manipulator joints is developed. An approach is presented to whole arm grasping control for continuum robots. The grasping controller is developed in two stages; high level path planning for the grasping objective, and a low level joint controller using a neural network feedforward component to compensate for dynamic uncertainties. Lastly, two controllers are developed for nonlinear haptic and teleoperator systems for coordination of the master and slave systems

Wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand: taxonomy, review and perspectives

In the last decade, we have witnessed a drastic change in the form factor of audio and vision technologies, from heavy and grounded machines to lightweight devices that naturally fit our bodies. However, only recently, haptic systems have started to be designed with wearability in mind. The wearability of haptic systems enables novel forms of communication, cooperation, and integration between humans and machines. Wearable haptic interfaces are capable of communicating with the human wearers during their interaction with the environment they share, in a natural and yet private way. This paper presents a taxonomy and review of wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand, focusing on those systems directly addressing wearability challenges. The paper also discusses the main technological and design challenges for the development of wearable haptic interfaces, and it reports on the future perspectives of the field. Finally, the paper includes two tables summarizing the characteristics and features of the most representative wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand

Optimization-Based wearable tactile rendering

Novel wearable tactile interfaces offer the possibility to simulate tactile interactions with virtual environments directly on our skin. But, unlike kinesthetic interfaces, for which haptic rendering is a well explored problem, they pose new questions about the formulation of the rendering problem. In this work, we propose a formulation of tactile rendering as an optimization problem, which is general for a large family of tactile interfaces. Based on an accurate simulation of contact between a finger model and the virtual environment, we pose tactile rendering as the optimization of the device configuration, such that the contact surface between the device and the actual finger matches as close as possible the contact surface in the virtual environment. We describe the optimization formulation in general terms, and we also demonstrate its implementation on a thimble-like wearable device. We validate the tactile rendering formulation by analyzing its force error, and we show that it outperforms other approaches

CoVR: A Large-Scale Force-Feedback Robotic Interface for Non-Deterministic Scenarios in VR

We present CoVR, a novel robotic interface providing strong kinesthetic feedback (100 N) in a room-scale VR arena. It consists of a physical column mounted on a 2D Cartesian ceiling robot (XY displacements) with the capacity of (1) resisting to body-scaled users' actions such as pushing or leaning; (2) acting on the users by pulling or transporting them as well as (3) carrying multiple potentially heavy objects (up to 80kg) that users can freely manipulate or make interact with each other. We describe its implementation and define a trajectory generation algorithm based on a novel user intention model to support non-deterministic scenarios, where the users are free to interact with any virtual object of interest with no regards to the scenarios' progress. A technical evaluation and a user study demonstrate the feasibility and usability of CoVR, as well as the relevance of whole-body interactions involving strong forces, such as being pulled through or transported.Comment: 10 pages (without references), 14 pages tota