Haptics for medical applications

Abstract

Robots and intelligent machines in the future should adapt themselves autonomously to the open environment in order to realize physical support for human activities. In addition, the physical support by them must be based on the individual’s “action” and “sensation” in order that the physical support becomes really human-friendly. Then, the robots must actively recognize the unknown environment according to the individual’s action. They also have to transmit the environmental information obtained to the individual in harmony with their sensations. Since haptic information is so important, as well as visual information and auditory information, the development of realworld haptics is one of the important key issues for the purpose. Haptic information is inherently bilateral, since an action is always accompanied by a reaction. That means that bilateral control with high transparency is necessary to transmit real-world haptic information artificially. A acceleration-based bilateral controller is one of the solutions for realizing high transparency. There remain many issues to solve for the application of haptics to the physical support of actual human activities. A haptic system with high transparency should obtain flexibility in order to extend its function. This article presents flexible actuation techniques that have high force transferability and flexibility in actuators’ arrangements. Furthermore, in order to support human activities in remote environments, bilateral telehaptics over a network is also described. Finally, this article introduces the fundamental techniques in haptics, including several examples of medical applications, since they are the first target of real-world haptics.