Foot-pedal: Haptic feedback human interface bridging sensational gap between remote places

Teleconferencing or teleoperation has been used for some years in actual fields including many different types of companies, faculties, hospitals and even in game industries. The technology involves capturing the user's movements and replaying it at a remote location. However, today's technology reaches to not just presenting oneself virtually at a remote location, but also letting the user experience the remote environment without having to actually exist in the place. This allows the user to feel and manipulate the remote environment or another person in a more intuitive manner and an actual physical interaction between the user and the remote environment possible. This paper suggests a new type of a human interface which the user can manipulate with his or her feet allowing the hands to move freely during the interaction. The proposed mechanism is a foot-pedal type haptic feedback human interface and is equipped with 4 different sensors that can observe the user's movements in 4 different DOFs. In addition, the interface is composed of 2 independent motors which can provide the user with the haptic feedback from the remote environment. In this paper, various control algorithms are presented which decide the action or haptic feedback from the interface depending on the remote surroundings. The performance of the proposed interface is verified through several experiments in different scenarios.