Development of pneumatic human interface and its application for compliance display

The goal of this study is to develop a human interface that can display compliance for a human hand aiming at application in the field of virtual reality. A pneumatic parallel manipulator is introduced as a driving mechanism of the human interface, which yields the characteristic that the manipulator works as a kind of elastic body even when its position/orientation is under the control. Utilizing this elastic characteristic, a compliance display scheme is proposed. The validity of the proposed scheme is verified experimentally.