Haptic technology

About: Haptic technology is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 18818 publications have been published within this topic receiving 306713 citations. The topic is also known as: haptics & haptic media.

Micro resonator using electromagnetic actuator for tactile display

Abstract: This paper proposes a tactile display for presenting the moving or the shearing direction to the skin of a human finger. We consider stimulating tactile sense by vibration and the development of a tactile feedback system. The proposed vibro-tactile stimulator employs a number of vibrating pins to provide a ticking sensation to the human operator's skin. We used micro resonators driven by electromagnetic force to vibrating pins. We performed an experiment to present vibro-tactile stimulation using a single micro resonator, and confirmed the ability to perform vibro-tactile stimulation. Next we arrayed the micro resonators in a matrix state and constructed the tactile display. We made a tactile feedback experiment using this display. From the experimental results, it was made clear that the tactile display had the ability to present much information to a human finger.

A guided tour in haptic audio visual environments and applications

Abstract: The science of haptics has received enormous attention in the last decade. Activities in different disciplines such as robotics, computer graphics, and psychophysics have been the foundation of haptic science. Nowadays, haptic research comprises four interdisciplinary research branches: human haptics, machine haptics, computer haptics, and the newly introduced multimedia haptics. This paper traces the evolution of haptics technology from the introductory concepts and haptic system architecture, to current technology in the four haptics research branches and applications. Finally, we summarise our findings and present a vision for overcoming challenges and our direction for future research in this area.

Making Sense of Vision and Touch: Learning Multimodal Representations for Contact-Rich Tasks

Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured environments often require both haptic and visual feedback. It is nontrivial to manually design a robot controller that combines these modalities, which have very different characteristics. While deep reinforcement learning has shown success in learning control policies for high-dimensional inputs, these algorithms are generally intractable to train directly on real robots due to sample complexity. In this article, we use self-supervision to learn a compact and multimodal representation of our sensory inputs, which can then be used to improve the sample efficiency of our policy learning. Evaluating our method on a peg insertion task, we show that it generalizes over varying geometries, configurations, and clearances, while being robust to external perturbations. We also systematically study different self-supervised learning objectives and representation learning architectures. Results are presented in simulation and on a physical robot.

Integration of the Rutgers Master II in a virtual reality simulation

Abstract: A novel compact hand master device with force feedback is presented. The Second Generation Rutgers Master (RM-II) integrates position-sensing and force-feedback to multiple fingers in a single structure, without the use of sensing gloves. The paper first discusses the kinematics and calibration followed by the integration of the device into a single-user, ethernet-distributed, virtual reality (VR) environment. The VR simulation features: visual feedback, force feedback, interactive sound and object interaction.

A Miniature Instrument Tip Force Sensor for Robot/Human Cooperative Microsurgical Manipulation with Enhanced Force Feedback

Abstract: This paper reports the development of a new miniature force sensor to measure forces at the tip of a microsurgical instrument in three dimensions with sub-millinewton resolution. This sensor will enable enhanced force feedback during surgical intervention in which a user directly manipulates surgical instruments cooperatively with a force-reflecting robot arm. This “steady-hand” scaled force interaction enables a surgeon to sense millinewton forces between the instrument and delicate body tissues during microsurgery which would otherwise be far below the threshold of human tactile sensing. The magnified force feedback can increase the dexterity of the surgeon and improve safety by preventing large damaging forces from being exerted by the instrument. The design and analysis of the new force sensor is presented with preliminary testing and force scaling control results.