Conceptual Design and Implementation of a Low-Cost Haptic Feedback Controller

This paper presents a conceptual study in designing a haptic feedback controller that can be implemented on a robotic arm that can be used for remotely collecting sample in contamination area, especially when the state of the sample is extremely delicate. The haptic robotic arm will allow the user to control the movement of the robot arm as well as giving touch sensation merely as a human arm can do. The objectives of this project are to propose a controller that uses a haptic system approach that is implemented and tested using low-cost, off-the-shelf microcontroller. The simple two-servo-motors test setup is used to demonstrate the feedback of the proposed haptic configuration. The results show that the proposed haptic system manage to react accordingly with any perturbation that acted upon the controlled servo motor that indicates the sense of touch (feedback) back to corresponding `human' servo motors. These responses indicate a low-cost approach to create a haptic feedback system that can be further expanded for more complicated system such as human fingers for grabbing a delicate object.