Tactile Telepresence System

In this paper, a new tactile telepresence system is developed. The new system consists of a polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) tactile sensor, a friction-type tactile display, and a master-slave control system. The tactile sensor, which is situated at the slave site, is equipped with a contact force control unit to reproduce a finger-object contact condition at the master site. Also, the tactile sensor works with a motor stage to reproduce the operator's finger motion while exploring a surface. With these units, the system realizes master-slave surface texture presentation. In this research, it was demonstrated that the tactile display could display uniform and periodic surface textures, or surface roughness.