A Wearable 3-DOF Wire-driven Force Feedback Device

This paper addresses a new design and control of a wearable 3DOF force feedback device based on wire-driven parallel mechanisms. Unlike the existing wearable force feedback devices, the proposed wire-driven device is not supported by a rigid frame attached to the upper body. All electrical components of the device are located inside a wearable jacket and the device is powered by a few batteries. The force applied to the end-effector is produced by the tension of three wires connected to it and the tension of the wires are controlled by three motors. The kinematics and workspace analysis are discussed and a simple algorithm that makes a wire maintain minimum tension while without making it slack is proposed. Also end-effector position errors caused by the flexible positions of wire extracting points are discussed. Finally, some empirical results are presented. This device may be used in some applications which need force feedback functions, especially with mobile computer devices such as mobile phones, computers and PDAs