A Data-Driven Approach to Remote Tactile Interaction: From a BioTac Sensor to any Fingertip Cutaneous Device

This paper presents a novel approach to remote tactile interaction, wherein a human uses a telerobot to touch a remote environment. The proposed system consists of a BioTac tactile sensor, in charge of registering contact deformations, and a custom cutaneous device, in charge of applying those deformations to the user’s fingertip via a 3-DoF mobile platform. We employ a novel data-driven algorithm to directly map the BioTac’s sensed stimuli to input commands for the cutaneous device’s motors, without using any kind of skin deformation model. We validated the proposed approach by carrying out a remote tactile interaction experiment. Although this work employed a specific cutaneous device, the experimental protocol and algorithm are valid for any similar display.