Haptics and Telerobotics

Abstract

In telerobotic systems haptics play an important part from the very beginning in the early fifties. Even in exploration tasks, which are mainly perceived by 3D visual feedback, haptics provide additional information about the material or the surfaces of a remote scene. Manipulating the distant environment requires feedback of interaction forces, though the remote robot has to react on them. For telerobotic systems the ultimate goal is transparency, meaning the human operator cannot distinguish between operating in a local or a distant environment. For the haptic modality this implies research in two main fields: robotic hardware, both handcontroller and tele-robots, and bilateral control with time-delay. With the evolving technology in these research areas telerobotic systems can now be found in a variety of different application fields, e.g. Microassembly, Medicine or Space.