Haptic processing for transmitting real-world haptic information

Artificial acquisition, preservation and reproduction of human sensations are basic technologies of communication engineering. For example, auditory information is obtained by a microphone, and a speaker reproduces it by artificial means. Furthermore, a video camera and a television make it possible to transmit visual sensation by broadcasting. On the contrary, haptic information is subject to the Newton's ldquolaw of action and reactionrdquo in the real world. Since such haptic information has bilateral characteristics, a device which acquire, preserve, and reproduce the information has not been established. From the point of view, real-world haptics is one of the key technologies for realization of haptic communications. In this paper, a novel haptic processing technique is proposed to process the acquired haptic information. A master-slave bilateral system is used to acquire the real-world haptic information. The bilateral system is composed of two linear motors controlled by acceleration control based on a disturbance observer. The disturbance observer obtains the haptic information from a human and the environment without force sensors. The acquired haptic information is analyzed by Fourier transformation and transmitted with frequency scaling. As a result, it is possible to change the reproduced haptic sensation from the remote environment. The experimental results show the viability of the proposed method.