Two Finger Grasping Simulation with Cutaneous and Kinesthetic Force Feedback

This paper presents an experiment of two finger grasping. The task considered is the peg-in-hole and the simulated force feedback is cutaneous or kinesthetic. The kinesthetic feedback is provided by a commercial haptic device while the cutaneous one is provided by a new haptic display proposed in this work, which allows to render at the fingertip a wide range of contact forces. The device consists of a mobile surface, which interacts with the fingertip, actuated by three wires directly connected to the motors placed on the grounded structure of the display. This work summarizes the design of the proposed display and presents the main relationships which describe its kinematics and dynamics. Results showed that cutaneous feedback exhibits improved performances when compared to visual feedback only.