Cutaneous and Kinesthetic Cues to Improve Transparency in Teleoperation

Abstract

The first part of the book showed promising results and proved the effectiveness of employing cutaneous-only feedback in various teleoperation scenarios. However, providing solely cutaneous stimuli still showed significantly worse performance than providing the user with full haptic feedback. This chapter takes up this challenge and proposes a new system able to combine cutaneous and kinesthetic feedbacks, with the objective of improving the transparency of teleoperation systems with force reflection while guaranteeing their safety. The proposed control algorithm integrates kinesthetic haptic feedback, provided by common grounded haptic interfaces, with cutaneous haptic feedback, provided by ungrounded cutaneous devices. 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 then recovered by providing a suitable amount of cutaneous force through custom ungrounded 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.