TiltXter: CNN-based Electro-tactile Rendering of Tilt Angle for Telemanipulation of Pasteur Pipettes

The shape of deformable objects can change drastically during grasping by robotic grippers, causing an ambiguous perception of their alignment and hence resulting in errors in robot positioning and telemanipulation. Rendering clear tactile patterns is fundamental to increasing users’ precision and dexterity through tactile haptic feedback during telemanipulation. Therefore, different methods have to be studied to decode the sensors’ data into haptic stimuli. This work presents a telemanipulation system for plastic pipettes that consists of a Force Dimension Omega.7 haptic interface endowed with two electro-stimulation arrays and two tactile sensor arrays embedded in the 2-finger Robotiq gripper. We propose a novel approach based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) to detect the tilt of deformable objects. The CNN generates a tactile pattern based on recognized tilt data to render further electro-tactile stimuli provided to the user during the telemanipulation. The study has shown that using the CNN algorithm, tilt recognition by users increased from 23.13% with the downsized data to 57.9%, and the success rate during teleoperation increased from 53.12% using the downsized data to 92.18% using the tactile patterns generated by the CNN.