A Framework for Building Haptic Interactions for Teleoperation Systems

From the nano/micro-manipulation domain to the intervention in the nuclear field, haptics has become essential in actual teleoperation systems. The active property of this modality makes gestures more reliable and accurate. Nowadays, there is much research concerning the integration of haptic modality. The proposed solutions give, according to the adopted approaches, various efficiency levels. However, this work doesn’t integrate generally and systematically psychophysics studies and ergonomics considerations. These elements are very important if we want to include effectively the human operator in any teleoperation system. Otherwise, various new applications present to the human operator several unfamiliar phenomena (e.g., nanoenvironments, underwater environments and the outer space environments). It’s thus necessary in this type of application to transform virtually the remote environment to present to the operator nature-like haptic interactions. In this paper, we present a framework for building haptic interactions for teleoperation systems. This framework integrates the psychophysics studies and ergonomics elements, and presents a method to project the remote environment in the intuitive perception space.