A basic study of a pillow-shaped haptic device using a pneumatic actuator

As a new haptic device for daily use, a pillow-shaped haptic device using a pneumatic actuator, the Air-pillow telephone, is proposed. The Air-pillow telephone allows an intimate couple at a distance to mutually share the partner’s sense of touch and presence, which cannot be easily conveyed by conventional communication media: text, voice, still image and video. We have developed a prototype system with an air bag driven by a piston-cylinder mechanism. The user’s head motion affects the air pressure of the air bag and then its signal is bilaterally transmitted in real time via internet to actuate the partner’s air pillow. Inside the pillow’s subtle motion, the user can find the existence of the partner’s haptic language. This paper describes the Air-pillow telephone concept and application as well as implementation of the prototype system, modeling and control design. For the user’s sense of touch control method, we propose two control modes: the seesaw mode and the synchronous mode. The validity of the proposed idea was confirmed with successful simulation and experimental results under the TCP/IP network environment.