This work represents the initial development of a haptic display system for increased presence in virtual experiences. The developed system creates a two-way connection between a virtual space, mediated through a virtual reality headset, and a physical space, mediated through a robotic manipulator, creating the foundation for future haptic display development using the haptic proxy framework. Here, we assesses hand-tracking performance of the Meta Quest Pro headset, examining hand tracking latency and static positional error to characterize performance of our system.
Haptic feedback is an important component of creating an immersive mixed reality experience. Traditionally, haptic forces are rendered in response to the user's interactions with the virtual environment. In this work, we explore the idea of rendering haptic forces in a proactive manner, with the explicit intention to influence the user's behavior through compelling haptic forces. To this end, we present a framework for active haptic guidance in mixed reality, using one or more robotic haptic proxies to influence user behavior and deliver a safer and more immersive virtual experience. We provid…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Facebook Reality Labs（Facebook现实实验室）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）
We propose a haptic system that applies forces or skin deformation to the user's arm, rather than at the fingertips, for believable interaction with virtual objects as an alternative to complex thimble devices. Such a haptic system would be able to convey information to the arm instead of the fingertips, even though the user manipulates virtual objects using their hands. We developed a set of haptic sketches to determine which directions of skin deformation are deemed more believable during a grasp and lift task. Subjective reports indicate that normal forces were the most believable feedback …
OPPO Research Center（OPPO研究院）；University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）
Robots assist in many areas that are considered unsafe for humans to operate. For instance, in handling pandemic diseases such as the recent Covid-19 outbreak and other outbreaks like Ebola, robots can assist in reaching areas dangerous for humans and do simple tasks such as pick up the correct medicine (among a set of bottles prescribed) and deliver to patients. In such cases, it might not be good to rely on the fully autonomous operation of robots. Since many mobile robots are fully functional with low-level tasks such as grabbing and moving, we consider the mixed-initiative control where th…
Leveraging Tactile Sensing to Render both Haptic Feedback and Virtual Reality 3D Object Reconstruction in Robotic Telemanipulation
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；School of Engineering and Materials Science（工程与材料科学学院）；Humanoid AI（人形人工智能公司）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences（生物医学工程与影像科学学院）
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Kadir Has University（卡迪尔哈斯大学）
Relocation of haptic feedback from the fingertips to the wrist has been considered as a way to enable haptic interaction with mixed reality virtual environments while leaving the fingers free for other tasks. We present a pair of wrist-worn tactile haptic devices and a virtual environment to study how various mappings between fingers and tactors affect task performance. The haptic feedback rendered to the wrist reflects the interaction forces occurring between a virtual object and virtual avatars controlled by the index finger and thumb. We performed a user study comparing four different finge…
Grasping is an incredible ability of animals using their arms and limbs in their daily life. The human hand is an especially astonishing multi-fingered tool for precise grasping, which helped humans to develop the modern world. The implementation of the human grasp to virtual reality and telerobotics is always interesting and challenging at the same time. In this work, authors surveyed, studied, and analyzed the human hand-grasping behavior for the possibilities of haptic grasping in the virtual and remote environment. This work is focused on the motion and force analysis of fingers in human h…
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科技学院）
We propose a novel concept of augmented reality (AR) human-drone interaction driven by RL-based swarm behavior to achieve intuitive and immersive control of a swarm formation of unmanned aerial vehicles. The DroneARchery system developed by us allows the user to quickly deploy a swarm of drones, generating flight paths simulating archery. The haptic interface LinkGlide delivers a tactile stimulus of the bowstring tension to the forearm to increase the precision of aiming. The swarm of released drones dynamically avoids collisions between each other, the drone following the user, and external o…
Robotic Calibration Based on Haptic Feedback Improves Sim-to-Real Transfer
Department of Applied Informatics, Comenius University Bratislava, Slovakia（应用信息学院，科门尼乌斯大学布拉迪斯拉发分校，斯洛伐克）；Department of Informatics, University of Hamburg, Germany（信息学院，汉堡大学，德国）
HapticGiant: A Novel Very Large Kinesthetic Haptic Interface with Hierarchical Force Control
Intelligent Sensor-Actuator-Systems Laboratory (ISAS), Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（智能传感器-执行器系统实验室（ISAS），人机学与机器人研究所，卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院（KIT））
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Montpellier（蒙彼利埃大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Laboratory of Informatics, Robotics and Microelectronics of Montpellier (LIRMM)（蒙彼利埃信息学、机器人学与微电子学实验室（LIRMM））
Hand-held haptic devices can allow for greater freedom of motion and larger workspaces than traditional grounded haptic devices. They can also provide more compelling haptic sensations to the users' fingertips than many wearable haptic devices because reaction forces can be distributed over a larger area of skin far away from the stimulation site. This paper presents a hand-held kinesthetic gripper that provides guidance cues in four degrees of freedom (DOF). 2-DOF tangential forces on the thumb and index finger combine to create cues to translate or rotate the hand. We demonstrate the device'…
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech)（斯科尔科沃科学技术学院）
Today there is a high variety of haptic devices capable of providing tactile feedback. Although most of existing designs are aimed at realistic simulation of the surface properties, their capabilities are limited in attempts of displaying shape and position of virtual objects. This paper suggests a new concept of distributed haptic display for realistic interaction with virtual object of complex shape by a collaborative robot with shape display end-effector. MirrorShape renders the 3D object in virtual reality (VR) system by contacting the user hands with the robot end-effector at the calculat…
Towards Tangible Immersion for Cobot Programming-by-Demonstration: Visual, Tactile and Haptic Interfaces for Mixed-Reality Cobot Automation in Semiconductor Manufacturing
Intel Labs, Intelligent System Research, Human-Robot Collaboration（英特尔实验室、智能系统研究、人机协作）
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech)（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院（Skoltech））
TouchVR is a novel wearable haptic interface which can deliver multimodal tactile stimuli on the palm by DeltaTouch haptic display and vibrotactile feedback on the fingertips by vibration motors for the Virtual Reality (VR) user. DeltaTouch display is capable of generating 3D force vector at the contact point and presenting multimodal tactile sensation of weight, slippage, encounter, softness, and texture. The VR system consists of HTC Vive Pro base stations and head-mounted display (HMD), and Leap Motion controller for tracking the user's hands motion in VR. The MatrixTouch, BallFeel, and Rob…
RoomShift is a room-scale dynamic haptic environment for virtual reality, using a small swarm of robots that can move furniture. RoomShift consists of nine shape-changing robots: Roombas with mechanical scissor lifts. These robots drive beneath a piece of furniture to lift, move and place it. By augmenting virtual scenes with physical objects, users can sit on, lean against, place and otherwise interact with furniture with their whole body; just as in the real world. When the virtual scene changes or users navigate within it, the swarm of robots dynamically reconfigures the physical environmen…
Rendering stable hard surfaces is an important problem in haptics for many tasks, including training simulators for orthopedic surgery or dentistry. Current impedance devices cannot provide enough force and stiffness to render a wall, and the high friction and inertia of admittance devices make it difficult to render free space. We propose to address these limitations by combining haptic augmented reality, untethered haptic interaction, and an encountered-type haptic display. We attach a plate with the desired hardness on the kinesthetic device's end-effector, which the user interacts with usi…
Grounding of kinesthetic feedback against a user's hand can increase the portability and wearability of a haptic device. However, the effects of different hand-grounding locations on haptic perception of a user are unknown. In this letter, we investigate the effects of three different hand-grounding locations-back of the hand, proximal phalanx of the index finger, and middle phalanx of the index finger-on haptic perception using a newly designed wearable haptic device. The novel device can provide kinesthetic feedback to the user's index finger in two directions: along the finger-axis and in t…
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院）
This paper presents a novel haptic device DeltaFinger designed to deliver the force of interaction with virtual objects by guiding user's finger with wearable delta mechanism. The developed interface is capable to deliver 3D force vector to the fingertip of the index finger of the user, allowing complex rendering of virtual reality (VR) environment. The developed device is able to produce the kinesthetic feedback up to 1.8 N in vertical projection and 0.9 N in horizontal projection without restricting the motion freedom of of the remaining fingers. The experimental results showed a sufficient …
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Hong Kong Productivity Council（香港生产力促进局）
There is invariably a trade-off between safety and efficiency for collaborative robots (cobots) in human-robot collaborations. Robots that interact minimally with humans can work with high speed and accuracy but cannot adapt to new tasks or respond to unforeseen changes, whereas robots that work closely with humans can but only by becoming passive to humans, meaning that their main tasks suspended and efficiency compromised. Accordingly, this paper proposes a new complementary framework for human-robot collaboration that balances the safety of humans and the efficiency of robots. In this frame…
Haptic Guidance and Haptic Error Amplification in a Virtual Surgical Robotic Training Environment
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Hospital for Special Surgery（特种外科医院）；University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Ben-Gurion University of the Negev（内盖夫本-古里安大学）；Intuitive Surgical Inc.（直觉外科公司）；Case Western Reserve University（凯斯西储大学）
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Hospital for Sick Children（病童医院）
Surgical simulators not only allow planning and training of complex procedures, but also offer the ability to generate structured data for algorithm development, which may be applied in image-guided computer assisted interventions. While there have been efforts on either developing training platforms for surgeons or data generation engines, these two features, to our knowledge, have not been offered together. We present our developments of a cost-effective and synergistic framework, named Asynchronous Multibody Framework Plus (AMBF+), which generates data for downstream algorithm development s…
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心（DLR））；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院（KIT））；University of Twente (UT)（特文特大学（UT））；Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学（TUM））
This article presents a novel telepresence system for advancing aerial manipulation in dynamic and unstructured environments. The proposed system not only features a haptic device, but also a virtual reality (VR) interface that provides real-time 3D displays of the robot's workspace as well as a haptic guidance to its remotely located operator. To realize this, multiple sensors namely a LiDAR, cameras and IMUs are utilized. For processing of the acquired sensory data, pose estimation pipelines are devised for industrial objects of both known and unknown geometries. We further propose an active…
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心（DLR））；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech)（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院（Skoltech））；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
This paper presents a novel telepresence system for enhancing aerial manipulation capabilities. It involves not only a haptic device, but also a virtual reality that provides a 3D visual feedback to a remotely-located teleoperator in real-time. We achieve this by utilizing onboard visual and inertial sensors, an object tracking algorithm and a pre-generated object database. As the virtual reality has to closely match the real remote scene, we propose an extension of a marker tracking algorithm with visual-inertial odometry. Both indoor and outdoor experiments show benefits of our proposed syst…
