Five Fingers Haptic Interface Robot HIRO: Design, Rendering, and Applications

Haptic interfaces are devices that allow human-machine interaction through force and touch. Combined haptic and visual interfaces have been around for decades. Yet, despite an enormous increase in research activity in the last few years, the science of haptics is still a technology in its infancy. The majority of commercially available haptic devices operate based on a principle of point interaction. Thus, contact between the operator and the simulated virtual environment occurs only at an arbitrary single point, typically the tip of a stylus or thimble used for interaction. Many literatures have identified the importance of multifinger display in the field of haptics (Wall et al., 2001). Haptic interfaces have been utilized in the area of tele-manipulation (Ivanisevic et al., 2000) (Dubey et al., 2001) (Elhajj et al., 2001) (Ando et al., 2001), interaction with micro/nano scale phenomenon (Guthold et al., 2000) (Marliere et al., 2004), medical training and evaluation (Basdogan et al., 2001) (Bardorfer et al., 2001) (Langrana et al., 1994). Multifinger haptic interface has a higher potential for the above mentioned applications than that of a single point haptic interface. A number of multifinger haptic interfaces (Kawasaki et al., 1993) (Ueda et al., 2004) (Walairacht et al., 2001) (Bouzit et al., 2002) (Yoshikawa et al., 2000) (CyberGlove Systems, 2009) have been developed. However, the issue of developing a haptic interface opposite to the human hand that reflects the force feeling to the finger tips was never addressed. The haptic interface is demanded to be safe, work in wide operation space, and able to present not only force at the contact points but also the weight feeling of the virtual objects. Also impose no oppressive feeling to the operator’s hand. Moreover, the haptic interface itself imposes no weight feeling. In this chapter the new developed fivefingers Haptic Interface RObot (HIRO II) based on HIRO (Kawasaki et al., 2003) (Alhalabi et al., 2004) that addresses these issues is introduced. HIRO II is a new haptic device that enables users to interact and feel the virtual object safely and it does not impose any weight on the users hand since it is not wearable device nor it is cumbersome. Two main important issues were in mind while designing HIRO II, multiple interaction points and reflecting forces directly to the human fingertips where other haptic devices failed to provide suitable solutions. In addition, user’s safety and ease of attachment issues have been also considered while designing HIRO II. 11