Project Title: Evaluation of haptic feedback in robot trajectory control.
Project Code: MAM14.

The use of telerobotics can be very useful in hazardous environment operations. In telerobotics (master-slave robot) a haptic hand controller is useful to simulate a wide variety of force sensations. A 3 DOF haptic joystick can be programmed to to control a joystick, whilst receiving synthesised haptic sensations via the joystick handle. Thus bi-directional exchange of information can be used between the human operator and the slave robot, thus allowing an operator to control a remote robot. This is called kinesthetic force reflection. It consists of information transference to skin receptors by means of so-called skin (cutaneous) displays. Local vibrotactile irritations have the most informative characteristics, the human operator does not have the ability to adapt to them during sustained activity. Thus, robot force sensor signals are coded and sent to a matrix of miniature vibrators placed on an input handle. A pulse-frequency local irritations of hand or arm skin can be used to transmit the sensing information to the operator. A number of cutaneous displays and force feedback devices have been designed based on this principle. The results of studies performed with master-slave systems show that these devices permit the human operator to more exactly regulate grasping force and even to trace different planar prominent reference curves without visual feedback. The main advantage of this approach seems to be its full independence from a robot mechanical construction and its control system. This project deals with the study of a simple linear haptic device for controlling a PUMA robot arm by using a joystick. The objective is to is to evaluate the performance of the haptic feedback in robot trajectory control.