Integration of a Particle Jamming Tactile Display with a Cable-Driven Parallel Robot

Integration of a tactile display onto the end effector of a robot allows free-hand exploration of an encountered-type environment that provides both kinesthetic and cutaneous feedback. A novel tactile display approach, called Haptic Jamming, uses a combination of particle jamming and pneumatics to control the stiffness and shape of a surface. The tactile display mounts to the cable-driven platform of a kinesthetic system for medical simulation, called KineSys MedSim. The parallel structure of the robot provides a high strength-to-weight ratio for kinesthetic feedback in combination with a spatially aligned visual display. Its controller uses hand tracking to move the platform to the portion of the workspace the user is reaching toward. Data from a lump localization simulation demonstrates that the integrated system successfully tracks the user’s hand and reconfigures the tactile display according to the location of the end effector.