Auditory modulation of tactile taps perception

We tested whether the tactile perception of sequences of taps delivered on the index fingertip can be modulated by sequences of auditory beeps. In the first experiment, the tactile and auditory sequences were always presented simultaneously, and were structurally either similar or dissimilar. In the second experiment, the auditory and tactile sequences were always structurally similar but not always presented simultaneously. When structurally similar and presented simultaneously, the auditory sequences significantly modulated tactile taps perception. This automatic combination of “redundant-like” tactile and auditory signals likely constitutes an optimization process taking advantage of multimodal redundancy for perceptual estimates

The Role of Roles: Physical Cooperation between Humans and Robots

Since the strict separation of working spaces of humans and robots has experienced a softening due to recent robotics research achievements, close interaction of humans and robots comes rapidly into reach. In this context, physical human–robot interaction raises a number of questions regarding a desired intuitive robot behavior. The continuous bilateral information and energy exchange requires an appropriate continuous robot feedback. Investigating a cooperative manipulation task, the desired behavior is a combination of an urge to fulfill the task, a smooth instant reactive behavior to human force inputs and an assignment of the task effort to the cooperating agents. In this paper, a formal analysis of human–robot cooperative load transport is presented. Three different possibilities for the assignment of task effort are proposed. Two proposed dynamic role exchange mechanisms adjust the robot’s urge to complete the task based on the human feedback. For comparison, a static role allocation strategy not relying on the human agreement feedback is investigated as well. All three role allocation mechanisms are evaluated in a user study that involves large-scale kinesthetic interaction and full-body human motion. Results show tradeoffs between subjective and objective performance measures stating a clear objective advantage of the proposed dynamic role allocation scheme

Detection of Discrepancies and Sensory-Based Recovery for Virtual Reality Based Telemanipulation Systems

Teleoperators using an intermediate functional representation of the remote real environment (RE), suffer a lack of its accurate synthetic modeling. Indeed, discrepancies will always occur between the RE and, let's say, its artificial representation by means of virtual environment (VE). A strategy to deal with VE/RE uncertainties based mainly on sensory level interpretation is presented. It is directed to avoid use of task knowledge by providing a stream of virtual sensors values. Within the remote site, a supervisor is in charge of recovering from the VE/RE discrepancies by a continuous simulated and real states comparison. The states are derived respectively from simulated and real sensors interpretation. A simple experiment with the proposed approach is presented using only position (velocity) and force sensors. Limitations of the proposed approach are also discussed. 1 Introduction For various applications, many advanced teleoperators use an intermediate functional representation..

Thermal bilateral coupling " in teleoperators

Abstractm This paper presents an new method and formalism to achieve thermal feedback for teleoperation and telepresence applications. The basic idea is to realize an approach similar to force reflecting telerobotics. That is to say, bilateral coupling between thermal temperature and thermal flux variables. Thermal properties and exchange during contact are modeled with their relating equations. Similarly to force feedback coupling, four potential controllers are possible; we implemented all of them using stable and linear control schemes. Experimental results show that some coupling are superior in terms of thermal transparency and stability. We used two Peltier heat pumps as thermal sources; the one serving as a thermal display while the other one is to play the role of a "robotic finger"

CONTACT: Arbitrary in-between motions for collision detection

A new approach to the collision detection problem was introduced in [8], that allows to detect collisions continuously and eciently between polyhedral primitives (vertices, edges and faces). This paper extends the results of [8] to continuously detect collisions between pairs of complex polyhedral objects. A C++ library, CONTACT, has been developped. The tests of this library, reported here, seem to show that this approach is especially suited for precise real-time interaction in virtual environments.

The Hidden Robot Concept - High Level Abstraction Teleoperation

ion Teleoperation A. Kheddar, C. Tzafestas, P. Coiffet Laboratoire de Robotique de Paris CNRS URA 1778 - UPMC - UVSQ 10-12 Avenue de l'Europe 78140 V'elizy France. E-mail [email protected] Abstract--- This paper discusses the development of new teleoperator systems. While many innovations during the last decade made teleoperation technology progress, some severe well known lacks that we enumerate still persist. With respect to some attractive solutions proposed for coping with these problems, we designed a bilateral control scheme based on what we called the hidden robot concept. The teleoperator achieves tasks manually in a natural way within a virtual environment (VE). Thanks to suitable bilateral tranformations, the virtual tasks are being reproduced by any slave robot within the remote site. Mainly task based, our approach is not considered like a high level task knowledge based control. Rather, we consider it like a more refined shared autonomy control with a high level abst..