Haptic processing for transmitting real-world haptic information

Artificial acquisition, preservation and reproduction of human sensations are basic technologies of communication engineering. For example, auditory information is obtained by a microphone, and a speaker reproduces it by artificial means. Furthermore, a video camera and a television make it possible to transmit visual sensation by broadcasting. On the contrary, haptic information is subject to the Newton´s ldquolaw of action and reactionrdquo in the real world. Since such haptic information has bilateral characteristics, a device which acquire, preserve, and reproduce the information has not been established. From the point of view, real-world haptics is one of the key technologies for realization of haptic communications. In this paper, a novel haptic processing technique is proposed to process the acquired haptic information. A master-slave bilateral system is used to acquire the real-world haptic information. The bilateral system is composed of two linear motors controlled by acceleration control based on a disturbance observer. The disturbance observer obtains the haptic information from a human and the environment without force sensors. The acquired haptic information is analyzed by Fourier transformation and transmitted with frequency scaling. As a result, it is possible to change the reproduced haptic sensation from the remote environment. The experimental results show the viability of the proposed method.