Haptic tactile feedback in teleoperation of a multifingered robot hand

This paper presents a teleoperated robot hand system with haptic tactile feedback. This system enables an operator to control a multi-fingered robot hand while feeling interactions of the robot hand with the remote environment. We have designed a fingertip tactile sensor to capture high resolution and high quality tactile images between the fingertip and the environment based on the optical total reflection principle. In order to feed back the tactile information to the operator, an electrotactile glove has also been developed. The haptic glove generates excitations when a touch/contact between the fingertips and the environment occurs. We have integrated the tactile sensor and haptic glove into the CUHK five-fingered hand system and examined/demonstrated their performance/effectiveness by experiments.