Haptic interaction between human and virtual iCub robot using Novint Falcon with CHAI3D and MATLAB

The paper describes our preliminary investigation of haptic interaction between the human and virtual iCub robot. With haptic interaction, the user is able to have tactile sensensaiton of the robot environment, and hence to manipulate a robot remotely, for instance, from the user's office to perform some tasks at home, or a patient operation, realized by a surgeon several miles away. In this work, haptic interaction has been implemented using a 3D joystick, Novint Falcon, to connect with a virtual robot created by the Cub Simulator, which works with YARP interface and simulates the real iCub robot developed by Italian scientists. To this end, two approaches based on CHAI3D and MATLAB are introduced and implemented in this paper and furthermore, some ideas to improve the human-robot interaction performance have also been discussed.