The Combination of Soft Microfingers and Wearable Interface Device for Haptic Teleoperation Robot System

摘要

This study develops soft microfingers for a haptic teleoperation robot system. The robot system can control the slave microfingers using a master interface device for an operator. The soft microfingers made of polymer can be driven by pneumatic balloon actuators as artificial muscles. In addition, the microfingers are integrated with sensors to acquire tactile information. The system can transmit tactile information acquired by the slave microfingers for haptic sense presentation. This study presents a haptic teleoperation robot system using soft microfingers integrated with artificial muscle and sense of touch. The demonstrated micro-finger measures 14 mm × 3 mm × 500 μm. A strain sensor is integrated into a micro-finger to detect its motion. Force is estimated based on the motion of the microfingers. A wearable master interface device for an operator is also presented. The interface device has sensors for motion capture of the operator and actuators for the force sense presentation. This paper reports on the combination of the soft microfingers and wearable sense presentation device for the haptic teleoperation robot system.