An Admittance Glove Mechanism for Controlling a Mobile Robot

* Address all correspondence to this author. ABSTRACT This paper presents a bidirectional teleoperation admittance haptic glove (RML glove) which can be used to control mobile robots. The glove receives information from the environment and the internal status of the mobile robot, and generates a force feedback to the operator through the wireless module which in return communicates command signals to the robot. This haptic device is a lightweight and portable actuator system that fits on bare hands, and adds a haptic sense of force feedback to all fingers without constraining their natural movement. An embedded lead screw mechanism provides force feedback that ranges from zero up to 35 N for each finger. Based on this force feedback, the operator can feel what the robot feels (e.g., link torque amount and distance to an obstacle) which enables a smoother and safer human-control of the robot. To evaluate the performance of the haptic glove, a master-slave control experiment based on force feedback between the glove and the mobile robot is conducted. The results demonstrate that the proposed admittance glove can augment tele-presence.