Vibrotactile Feedback for Haptics and Telemanipulation: Survey, Concept and Experiment

In telemanipulation and 3D virtual interactions it is important to transmit force sensation from the remote or virtual environment to the operator. Due to the weak points (control issues, robustness, cost) of real force feedback devices, methods where force is rendered on non-native sensory channels have grounds. In this paper, a survey of the related literature is presented and the concept of sensor-bridging type cognitive infocommunications based force reflecting schemes is discussed. A complete experimental infrastructure with hardware and software components is built providing a background for the investigation of the proposed methods from practical usability aspects. This environment is utilized in a pilot experiment with human participants providing substantial observations on the usability of sensor-bridging type vibrotactile force feedback methods. The test confirms that vibrotactile glove equipped with shaftless vibration motors can be successfully applied as tactile/haptic feedback device in immersive virtual reality applications.