Haptic guidance with force feedback to assist teleoperation systems via high speed networks

The employment of haptic devices in teleoperation systems and the use of motion restrictions during robot teleoperation provide the operator with increased awareness and can considerably improve the feeling of immersion and moreover his ability to perform complex tasks. In the last decade Internet has become one of the major sources of information. It already connects millions of computers and more than a billion people. Its spectacular growth have lead to the creation of new high speed networks with new capabilities. In the work described in this paper those networks that use recent-creation packet switched protocols like Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) with high Quality of Service (QoS) will serve as the communication channel for the teleoperation system.Peer Reviewe

Bilateral haptic guided Robot teleoperation via packet switched networks using wave variables with impedance adaptation

This paper presents the use of haptic devices in teleoperation systems with motion restrictions during robot teleoperation in order to provide the operator with increased awareness and better feeling of immersion, hence, improving his ability to perform complex tasks. The use of wave variables in the proposed system renders passive the communication channel, and moreover the new packet switched protocols like Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) with high Quality of Service (QoS), provides differentiated services for control signals.Peer Reviewe

Wearable Vibrotactile Haptic Device for Stiffness Discrimination during Virtual Interactions

In this paper, we discuss the development of cost effective, wireless, and wearable vibrotactile haptic device for stiffness perception during an interaction with virtual objects. Our experimental setup consists of haptic device with five vibrotactile actuators, virtual reality environment tailored in Unity 3D integrating the Oculus Rift Head Mounted Display (HMD) and the Leap Motion controller. The virtual environment is able to capture touch inputs from users. Interaction forces are then rendered at 500 Hz and fed back to the wearable setup stimulating fingertips with ERM vibrotactile actuators. Amplitude and frequency of vibrations are modulated proportionally to the interaction force to simulate the stiffness of a virtual object. A quantitative and qualitative study is done to compare the discrimination of stiffness on virtual linear spring in three sensory modalities: visual only feedback, tactile only feedback, and their combination. A common psychophysics method called the Two Alternative Forced Choice (2AFC) approach is used for quantitative analysis using Just Noticeable Difference (JND) and Weber Fractions (WF). According to the psychometric experiment result, average Weber fraction values of 0.39 for visual only feedback was improved to 0.25 by adding the tactile feedback