A High Performance Tactile Feedback Display and Its Integration in Teleoperation

This paper presents the development of a compact tactile display and its integration in teleoperation. The system's operation is based on the display of surface shape to an area of the fingertip through a 4 × 4 array of tactors moving perpendicularly to the skin surface. The tactors are spring loaded and are actuated remotely by dc motors through a flexible tendon transmission. This novel implementation of conventional actuation principles achieves a compact design with superior performance compared to devices of a similar footprint, demonstrating an excellent combination of tactor spatiotemporal resolution, force, and amplitude. The display's ergonomic design and high performance make it suitable for integration on haptic devices for tactile feedback in VR and in Teleoperation. This paper presents the design, control, and performance of the tactile display and of the transmission system. It also demonstrates its integration on an Omega7 force feedback device for the teleoperation of an LWR KUKA manipulator. An experiment is presented where users teleoperated the stylus of the robot in a 3D contour following task with and without tactile feedback. In this experiment, force feedback from the slave is fused with model-based local tactile feedback. Subjects' performances indicate an improvement in teleoperation when both tactile and force feedback are present.