Haptic devices providing various sensations have multiple applications spanning over many fields such as surgical training, robot-assisted minimal invasive surgery (MIS), military, space, and underwater exploration. Most of the existing haptic interfaces lack the capability to effectively replicate the remote environment due to the intricacies involved in providing all necessary sensations simultaneously. In this paper, a novel haptic device with three degrees of freedom (DOF) is developed to render high-fidelity touch sensations like stiffness, texture, shape, and shear concurrently. The proposed haptic device consists of a spherical segment affixed with an array of texture surfaces based on the virtual/remote environment. The device can move in 3-DOF, namely, the pitch, roll, and vertical motion. The haptic interface provides kinesthetic cues like stiffness, shape, and environmental shear and tactile cues like texture by combining the movements of the three actuators along with the segmented housing. A systematic kinematic analysis of the proposed design is presented. The performance is enhanced by implementing the hybrid control methodology that switches between impedance and position control, thus making the interaction realistic and immersive. Experiments have been performed on the developed haptic device, and the results demonstrate its accuracy in reproducing various modalities of haptic feedback of the virtual/remote environment.
A novel haptic grasper that renders touch sensations to the user in 3-DoF (degrees of freedom), namely linear, rotary, and grasping motions, is presented. The touch sensations of the grasper include the combination of kinesthetic and tactile modalities such as stiffness, texture, and shape. The device is equipped with two swappable modular segments that provide stiffness and shape sensations. To increase the haptic fidelity, the textural surfaces that surround the outer surface of the segments are equipped with vibro-actuators underneath them. These vibro-actuators contribute to increasing the number of perceivable textures by varying amplitude, frequency, duration, and envelope of vibrations. The proposed device is characterized in terms of stiffness, shape and texture rendering capabilities. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the developed haptic grasper in virtual/remote interactions. Also, the user studies and statistical analysis demonstrate that the users could perceive the high-fidelity haptic feedback with the unified sensations of kinesthetic and tactile cues.
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