Experimental testbed for the investigation of sensor-bridging feedback in tele-grasping

Despite intensive research in the past decades, providing high fidelity haptic feedback in Internet-based telemanipulation is still challenging. As an alternative solution, sensory substitution can be applied to transmit force and tactile information from the remote environment to the human operator. In this paper, an experimental environment is proposed that can be utilized in usability tests and fine tuning of Cognitive Infocommunications (CogInfoCom) based feedback methods for tele-grasping. The main benefit of this system is that it is mainly composed of commercially available components and devices which makes possible the reconstruction of a similar system in other laboratories dealing with sensor-bridging type haptic feedback. The control software is implemented on regular windows PCs, thus its maintenance and customization does not need any special knowledge of real-time operating systems. The master and slave part of the tele-grasping setup are connected via IP network, which gives rise to a number of issues in Internet-based teleoperation caused by network delay. The paper reviews the background of CogInfoCom based force-feedback in general, then describes the proposed experimental environment in details, and finally, presents the result of a pilot experiment that shows the potential of the proposed testbed.