A Mobile Haptic Interface for Bimanual Manipulations in Extended Remote/virtual Environments

The concept of a new mobile haptic interface for unconstrained bimanual manipulation is presented. This device, which has been developed at the High-Fidelity Telepresence and Teleaction Research Centre, Munich, Germany, allows locomotion and haptic interaction at the same time. In contrast to most existing haptic interfaces, it is therefore not restricted to desktop applications but also enables bimanual manipulation tasks with high interaction forces in extended remote or virtual environments. The design of this mobile haptic interface is based on a modular system consisting of two components: two haptic interfaces and a mobile platform. While the haptic interfaces only cover parts of the human arm workspace, the mobile platform extends these to arbitrarily large remote environments. A special design and control concept of the haptic interfaces makes it possible to decouple translational from rotational movements. This decoupling helps to significantly simplify the control algorithms which handle the interaction between the single components. The mobile platform which carries the two haptic interfaces must be positioned in such a way that the manipulability of both haptic interfaces is maximized. Different optimization strategies are presented and compared. The motion of the mobile platform must be synchronized with the control of the haptic interfaces in order to hide the platform motion from the operator. Finally, experimental results are presented. E-mail address: [email protected] E-mail address: [email protected] E-mail address: [email protected] E-mail address: [email protected] 268 Angelika Peer, Thomas Schauß, Ulrich Unterhinninghofen et al.