Soft tactile chip with in-situ sensing for haptic rendering and reverse feedback enhanced gross to fine teleoperation

In-situ sensing of feedback actuator offers spatiotemporal consistency of tele-haptic interactions and self-monitoring haptic feedback. Leveraging haptic actuator for fine teleoperation is also worth for investigation. Here, we report a soft tactile chip made by in-situ fabrication of sensor in actuator structure, which is featured by both haptic and thermal sensing and feedback. This chip consists of silicone based pneumatic actuator arrays with two elastomeric membranes which contain liquid metal micro channels, and pectin-based temperature sensor. In-situ sensing of tactile chip enables self-adaptive pneumatic haptic feedback via quantitative data compared to subjective test. In addition to direct haptic feedback during gross teleoperation stage, a concept of reverse haptic feedback allows finger micro-motions from leader side to be directly projected into follower side for manipulating target object during fine teleoperation stage. In general, the proposed device can be applied as modular component to realize mutual tactile perception and micro manipulations.