Roughness feeling telepresence system on the basis of real-time estimation of surface wavelengths

Tactile telepresence has been expected to be technology which encourages operators of robotic systems to remotely maneuver objects or recognize materials being touched through robotic arms. In remote environments, temporal disparity in tactile sensations is caused by temporal latency between a touch motion of the operator and a tactile stimulus applied on him. A framework of tactile telepresence systems, which is suitable in remote environments, has been proposed in the present paper. In the framework, a tactile display locally generates the tactile stimulus in synchronization with the touch motion of the operator in order to cancel communication delay. The tactile stimulus is generated by combining the motion and tactile factors, which are sensed by a tactile sensor. The factors are characteristic parameters of objects and effect on tactile sensations. In the present paper, physical parameters of the objects are selected as the factors because the tactile stimuli can be computed using physical models involving the motions and the parameters. Based on the proposed framework, a roughness feeling telepresence system was implemented and successfully transferred a roughness factor to the operator.