Cutaneous haptic feedback for robotics and Virtual Reality

Haptic feedback is a valuable tool for robotics and virtual interaction at large, spanning a great range of high-impact scenarios, including manipulation, human-robot interaction, medical robotics, microrobotics, and immersive environments. The benefits of haptic feedback include increased manipulation and perception accuracy, decreased completion time, decreased peak and mean force applied to the remote/virtual environment, increased immersion and user’s experience. These important characteristics have made haptic feedback one of the most anticipated and wanted feature in many fields of application, including robotics and Virtual Reality.

This HDR addresses my contributions to the field of cutaneous haptics, presenting my research in the design and development of haptic interfaces and rendering techniques as well as their application for ground robotic manipulation, mobile robotics, medical and assistive robotics, and Virtual and Augmented Reality. My presentation takes this journey by describing four representative families of haptic interfaces and discusses how they impact the field of robotics and immersive environments. I conclude with general perspectives on the main scientific and technological challenges that this field of research faces in the next future.