Developing a Vibrotactile Glove for Three-dimensional Haptic Information Sensing

Abstract

The active haptic perception is one of the primary function of a real robot. Most previous studies on tactile perception have used simplified tactile information interpreted through visual perception. However, data from visual interpretation need a large number of trials and there is a risk of critical errors in the real environment. In this paper, we developed a glove that can map the three-dimensional haptic detection result of the robot tactile sensors to intuitive vibration patterns. We also proposed a haptic mapping algorithm that combines three types of vibration modes. The contact information of the robot tactile sensors was encoded to vibration patterns to represent position and strength of the contact status. Using vibration transferred through the proposed device, a human operator could successfully grasp an object in unknown position. With the proposed system, a robot can learn more effective manipulation strategy by mimicking human reactions to the haptic sensation. © 2018 Authors.