Haptic feedback applications for Robonaut

Abstract

Robonaut is a humanoid robot designed by the Robotic Systems Technology Branch at NASA's Johnson Space Center in a collaborative effort with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This paper describes the implementation of haptic feedback into Robonaut and Robosim, the computer simulation of Robotonaut. In the first experiment, we measured the effects of varying feedback to a teleoperator during a handrail grasp task. Second, we conducted a teleoperated task, inserting a flexible beam into an instrumented receptacle. In the third experiment, we used Robonaut to perform a two‐arm task where a compliant ball was translated in the robot's workspace. The experimental results are encouraging as the Dexterous Robotics Lab continues to implement force feedback into its teleoperator hardware architecture.