1,721,205 research outputs found
Cutaneous Haptic Feedback in Robotic Teleoperation
No full textThis work addresses the challenge of providing effective cutaneous haptic feedback in robotic teleoperation, with the objective of achieving the highest degree of transparency whilst guaranteeing the stability of the considered systems. On the one hand, it evaluates teleoperation systems that provide only cutaneous cues to the operator, thus guaranteeing the highest degree of safety. This cutaneous-only approach shows intermediate performance between no force feedback and full haptic feedback provided by a grounded haptic interface, and it is best suitable for those scenarios where the safety of the system is paramount, e.g., robotic surgery. On the other hand, in order to achieve a higher level of performance, this work also investigates novel robotic teleoperation systems with force reflection able to provide mixed cutaneous and kinesthetic cues to the operator. Cutaneous cues can compensate for the temporary reduction of kinesthetic feedback necessary to satisfy certain stability conditions.
This state-of-the-art volume is oriented toward researchers, educators, and students who are interested in force feedback techniques for robotic teleoperation, cutaneous device design, cutaneous rendering methods and perception studies, as well as readers from different disciplines who are interested in applying cutaneous haptic technologies and methods to their field of interest
Sensory subtraction via cutaneous feedback: a novel technique to improve the transparency of robotic surgery
No full textIn this paper we present a novel technique to force feedback in robot-assisted surgery. It consists of substituting haptic force, composed by kinesthetic and cutaneous components, with cutaneous stimuli only. The force generated can be thus thought as a subtraction between the complete haptic interaction, cutaneous and kinesthetic, and the kinesthetic part of it. For this reason, we refer to this approach as sensory
subtraction and not sensory substitution. Sensory subtraction, first introduced in [1], aims at improving the performance of conventional force feedback techniques in teleoperation while
guaranteeing the same stability properties. In this work we recall the idea of sensory subtraction in teleoperation, together with its evaluation in two paradigmatic surgical teleoperation scenarios
Displaying sensed tactile cues with a fingertip haptic device
No full textTelerobotic systems enable humans to explore and manipulate remote environments for applications such as surgery and disaster response, but few such systems provide the operator with cutaneous feedback. This article presents a novel approach to remote cutaneous interaction; our method is compatible with any fingertip tactile sensor and any mechanical tactile display device, and it does not require a position/force or skin deformation model. Instead, it directly maps the sensed stimuli to the best possible input commands for the device’s motors using a data set recorded with the tactile sensor inside the device. As a proof of concept, we considered a haptic system composed of a BioTac tactile sensor, in charge of measuring contact deformations, and a custom 3-DoF cutaneous device with a flat contact platform, in charge of applying deformations to the user’s fingertip. To validate the proposed approach and discover its inherent tradeoffs, we carried out two remote tactile interaction experiments. The first one evaluated the error between the tactile sensations registered by the BioTac in a remote environment and the sensations created by the cutaneous device for six representative tactile interactions and 27 variations of the display algorithm. The normalized average errors in the best condition were 3.0 percent of the BioTac’s full 12-bit scale. The second experiment evaluated human subjects’ experiences for the same six remote interactions and eight algorithm variations. The average subjective rating for the best algorithm variation was 8.2 out of 10, where 10 is best
Sensory subtraction with cutaneous feedback to ensure safety in bimanual robot-assisted surgery
No full textTowards wearability in fingertip haptics: a 3-DoF wearable device for cutaneous force feedback
No full textWearability will significantly increase the use of haptics in everyday life, as has already happened for audio and video technologies. The literature on wearable haptics is mainly focused on vibrotactile stimulation, and only recently, wearable devices conveying richer stimuli, like force vectors, have been proposed. This paper introduces design guidelines for wearable haptics and presents a novel 3-DoF wearable haptic interface able to apply force vectors directly to the fingertip. It consists of two platforms: a static one, placed on the back of the finger, and a mobile one, responsible for applying forces at the finger pad. The structure of the device resembles that of parallel robots, where the fingertip is placed in between the static and the moving platforms. This work presents the design of the wearable display, along with the quasi-static modeling of the relationship between the applied forces and the platform's orientation and displacement. The device can exert up to 1.5 N, with a maximum platform inclination of 30 degree. To validate the device and verify its effectiveness, a curvature discrimination experiment was carried out: employing the wearable device together with a popular haptic interface improved the performance with respect of employing the haptic interface alone
Cutaneous Force Feedback as a Sensory Subtraction Technique in Haptics
No full textA novel sensory substitution technique is presented. Kinesthetic and cutaneous force feedback are substituted by
cutaneous feedback (CF) only, provided by two wearable devices able to apply forces to the index finger and the thumb, while holding
a handle during a teleoperation task. The force pattern, fed back to the user while using the cutaneous devices, is similar, in terms of
intensity and area of application, to the cutaneous force pattern applied to the finger pad while interacting with a haptic device providing
both cutaneous and kinesthetic force feedback. The pattern generated using the cutaneous devices can be thought as a subtraction
between the complete haptic feedback (HF) and the kinesthetic part of it. For this reason, we refer to this approach as sensory
subtraction instead of sensory substitution. A needle insertion scenario is considered to validate the approach. The haptic device is
connected to a virtual environment simulating a needle insertion task. Experiments show that the perception of inserting a needle using
the cutaneous-only force feedback is nearly indistinguishable from the one felt by the user while using both cutaneous and kinesthetic
feedback. As most of the sensory substitution approaches, the proposed sensory subtraction technique also has the advantage of not
suffering from stability issues of teleoperation systems due, for instance, to communication delays. Moreover, experiments show that
the sensory subtraction technique outperforms sensory substitution with more conventional visual feedback (VF)
Enhancing the performance of passive teleoperation systems via cutaneous feedback
No full textWe introduce a novel method to improve the performance of passive teleoperation systems with force reflection. It consists of integrating kinesthetic haptic feedback provided by common grounded haptic interfaces with cutaneous haptic feedback. The proposed approach can be used on top of any time-domain control technique that ensures a stable interaction by scaling down kinesthetic feedback when this is required to satisfy stability conditions (e.g., passivity) at the expense of transparency. Performance is recovered by providing a suitable amount of cutaneous force through custom wearable cutaneous devices. The viability of the proposed approach is demonstrated through an experiment of perceived stiffness and an experiment of teleoperated needle insertion in soft tissue
Optimized time-domain control of passive haptic teleoperation systems for multi-DoF interaction
No full textThis paper presents a time-domain passivity controller for multi-DoF haptic-enabled teleoperation systems aimed
at improving performance in terms of transparency for a given
task. By solving an online convex optimization problem, the
proposed approach enhances transparency of interaction along
specific directions of the environment space which are significant
for the task at hand, while guaranteeing system stability. An
experimental evaluation of the effectiveness of the proposed design
is presented, enrolling twenty participants. We compared the
performance of the proposed approach vs. those of a standard
energy-bounding time-domain algorithm during the exploration
of a virtual sphere. Results show that, as the communication
delay between the local and remote agents grows, the proposed
technique better preserves transparency along the directions that
are more important for the task at hand
A three DoFs wearable tactile display forexploration and manipulation of virtual objects
Full text linkThis paper describes a wearable haptic display with small dimensions and low weight, that allows to simulate on the fingertip a wide
range of contact forces. The device consists of two platforms: a static one, fixed on the back side of the finger, which supports three
actuators and the mechanical instrumented system, and a mobile one, which interacts directly with the fingertip. The platforms are
connected by three cables whose lengths and strains are regulated by the motors. Three force sensors, placed on the mobile platform,
measure the actual forces applied to the finger. This work summarizes the design of the proposed display and presents a numerical
model analysing the relationship between the forces registered at the fingertip and the platform’s orientation and displacement. In order
to validate the device an experiment of curvature discrimination has been carried out
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