Haptic Sensory Glove for Humans and Robots

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall objective of the proposed Phase-I project is to design a Haptic Sensory Glove with Smart Skin patches that have tactile sensing capability to enable a large variety of applications involving human hands, robot hands and interactions between the two. The specific aims of the proposed Phase I project include (1) Specification development for the sensory glove; (2) Development of tactile sensor array based on a commercial off the shelf product as well as a novel customized array from the MIT Touch Lab; (3) Skin and substrate compliant layer development; (4) Testing the sensor patches on robotic hands; (5) Algorithms and software development for decoding sensor information; (6) Completing the haptic sensory glove system integration; (6) Estimate system development cost and develop technical documentation. The project is expected to result in improved hardware and software design of tactile sensing arrays for enabling sensory and manipulation capabilities of robots and monitoring how humans use their hands in haptic tasks. The Smart Skin and the Haptic Sensory Glove proposed above have a wide variety of immediate applications as illustrated in this partial list: (1) Autonomous robot hands: monitoring and control of contact tasks in manufacturing, inventory sorting, hazardous environments; (2) Autonomous human hands: dynamic measurement of spatial pressure profiles of normal and impaired hand performance in various haptic tasks including handling of real, virtual or teleoperated objects; (3) Human-Computer Interfaces: Augmentation of applications involving touch tablets and screens, tactile mouse and haptic interfaces, all applications of virtual reality such as gaming, education and training; (4) Human-Robot Interaction: monitoring and control of direct interactions between human and robot hands as well as in improved master and slave systems for teleoperation applications ranging from hazardous operations to robot mediated surgery. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The proposed Haptic Sensory Glove is expected to have applications in both human and robot domains including interactions between the two. In particular, the medical applications of the Glove include (1) dynamic measurement of spatial pressure profiles of normal and impaired hand performance in various haptic tasks including handling of real, virtual or teleoperated objects and (2) improved master and slave systems for teleoperation applications such as robot mediated surgery.