Cutaneous Feedback in Teleoperated Robotic Hands

Teleoperation systems allow humans to interact with remote environments by providing the operator with similar feedback as those s/he would experience at the remote site. Moreover, teleoperators may communicate contact force/torque information from the slave to the master side thus increasing the sense of telepresence of the human operator and improving task performance. When the kinesthetic coupling between operator and environment is enhanced by dynamic coupling, we refer to bilateral teleoperation. Unfortunately force feedback could destabilize a teleoperated system if the communication delay is not properly managed. For this reason many researchers are focusing nowadays on cutaneous feedback that does not affect stability but can still provide useful information to the operator. In this paper we design a cutaneous-feedback teleoperation system where the slave robot is a robotic hand. The software architecture is developed using the Robot Operating System (ROS). In ROS it is easy to integrate the different hardware components in a seamless way. The cutaneous feedback is provided by mini-motors whose vibration intensities are related with the forces measured by the pressure sensors embedded in the hand. Mini-motors are cheap devices that can be easily fastened to the operator's fingers via Velcro straps. The motion of the operator hand is calculated by the Leap Motion controller and mapped into the motion of the robotic hand. The integration of these devices allows to overcome the problem of developing complex and expensive haptic devices for the human hand.