A physiological method for relaying frictional information to a human teleoperator

The ability to sense and respond to frictional variations is important for dexterous manipulation. It is demonstrated that it is possible to elicit rapid, nonhabituating and sustained grasp responses by means of a tactile display. Experiments in which subjects grasped and lifted an instrumented test object using the thumb and index finger are reported. While the object was held in air, rapid but small sliding movements were invoked between the object and either contact plate and caused a load force redistribution. This reliably triggered a grasp force increase similar to the ones elicited by natural slips occurring during normal manipulation. An important application of this finding is in relaying frictional information from a slave hand to a human operator. Furthermore, it may make it possible to reduce disparity between master and slave hands in force reflective telemanipulation systems