Thermal And Textural Feedback For Telepresence

This Thesis has been used as the basis for conference papers at:-

1. ICRA'96 - 1996 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
   (Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 22-28)
2. IROS'96 - IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems
   (Osaka, Japan, 4-8 November 1996)

Abstract

Tele-robotics - the remote control of robotic systems - can help in many situations; nuclear, space, undersea, and dangerous environments such as fire fighting and rescue. At the moment, it is hampered by the poor quality and quantity of sensory feedback to the human operator and to the supervisory control systems that reduce the workload on the operator. This lack of sensory feedback also affects people who have artificial limbs of have lost the sensory ability in a limb.

This project had the aim of improving two areas of sensory feedback; Textural feedback, which includes the sensations of slip, edge detection, and textural information of objects being manipulated, and Thermal feedback, which includes the thermal conductivity and temperature of an object being manipulated.

To this end a small, portable textural and thermal feedback system was designed and constructed, and system software developed for the microcontroller and PC. The system was tested, both for physical accuracy and speed, and for physiological accuracy of the sensations. In the case of thermal feedback, the system performed well, but in the case of textural feedback, some performance was below that expected.

The system was also used for real-time object material recognition by thermal characteristics, and virtual object sensation generation, producing highly accurate results.

Full Document Download

The full document is available in Adobe .PDF format:-

 Main Document (**1.6MB**) first conversion attempt - see note below

 Appendixes (**1.6MB**) first conversion attempt - see note below

 (Note - the document was originally written in Wordperfect 5.1, sucked into Word 97 then PDF'ed. In the process most of the graphics were trashed by word, and I haven't got around to fixing them - I apologise for this)

Research carried out at the University of Salford, 1992-1993, and continued in spare time 1993-1995, MSc by Thesis awarded May 1996

Research sponsored by the University of Salford. Supervisor:- Darwin Caldwell, Dept. of Electronic and Electrical Eng.

Steve Lawther Last Updated by Steve Lawther on 14 September 1999.

Thermal and Textural Feedback for Telepresence

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