Robot-MEdiated Object manipulation with haptic feedback

The ROMEO project aims to improve multimodal (kinesthetic and tactile) information integration for robot-mediated remote manipulation.

Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery is a typical and successful example of robot teleoperation. Teleoperation of robot manipulators allows the operators to be out of harm’s way or protected from the elements (e.g., deep sea) or manipulate smaller or heavier items than the operator could handle. However, the overall system’s effectiveness is limited by the lack of force or tactile feedback to the user. Moreover, other tasks, such as exploratory palpation to detect hard lumps in surrounding soft tissue, cannot be performed. Thus, enhancing these teleoperated systems with force and haptic feedback might make many procedures safer and potentially faster and improve their quality. Thus, this project seeks to translate haptic and force sensing from a robot into haptic stimulation for the user in a human-centered manner, i.e., considering the user’s biomechanical and sensorimotor systems to improve teleoperated manipulation to make the system easier to operate. Such a tight amalgamation of engineering and neuroscience is challenging. However, it holds tremendous potential for improving teleoperated robot manipulation.