A study on the role of cutaneous and kinesthetic force feedback in teleoperation is presented. Cutaneous cues provide less transparency than kinesthetic force, but they do not affect the stability of the teleoperation system. On the other hand, kinesthesia provides a compelling illusion of telepresence but affects the stability of the haptic loop. However, when employing common grounded haptic interfaces, it is not possible to independently control the cutaneous and kinesthetic components of the interaction. For this reason, many control techniques ensure a stable interaction by scaling down both kinesthetic and cutaneous force feedback, even though acting on the cutaneous channel is not necessary.\ud \ud We discuss here the feasibility of a novel approach. It aims at improving the realism of the haptic rendering, while preserving its stability, by modulating cutaneous force to compensate for a lack of kinesthesia. We carried out two teleoperation experiments, evaluating (1) the role of cutaneous stimuli when reducing kinesthesia and (2) the extent to which an overactuation of the cutaneous channel can fully compensate for a lack of kinesthetic force feedback. Results showed that, to some extent, it is possible to compensate for a lack of kinesthesia with the aforementioned technique, without significant performance degradation. Moreover, users showed a high comfort level in using the proposed system

We introduce a novel method to improve the performance of passive teleoperation systems with force reflection. It consists of integrating kinesthetic haptic feedback provided by common grounded haptic interfaces with cutaneous haptic feedback. The proposed approach can be used on top of any time-domain control technique that ensures a stable interaction by scaling down kinesthetic feedback when this is required to satisfy stability conditions (e.g., passivity) at the expense of transparency. Performance is recovered by providing a suitable amount of cutaneous force through custom wearable cutaneous devices. The viability of the proposed approach is demonstrated through an experiment of perceived stiffness and an experiment of teleoperated needle insertion in soft tissue.

Abstract-A novel idea for improving transparency of teleoperation systems with force feedback is presented. This approach is based on the idea of sensory subtraction presented in [12], and consists of providing the operator with independently controlled kinesthetic and cutaneous feedback to improve the realism of haptic rendering of the remote environment (i.e., transparency), while preserving stability. More specifically, cutaneous force feedback is employed to recover transparency when a lack of kinesthetic feedback has to be enforced to keep the teleoperation loop stable. The viability of this approach is demonstrated with two experiments of teleoperated needle insertion. Results showed improved performance with respect to common control techniques not employing the proposed cutaneous compensation.

A study on the role of cutaneous and kinesthetic force feedback in teleoperation is presented. Cutaneous cues provide less transparency than kinesthetic force feedback but they do not affect the stability of the teleoperation system. On the other hand, kinesthesia provides a realistic illusion of telepresence but it affects the stability of the haptic loop. Several well-established control techniques ensure a stable interaction by scaling down force feedback as and when required, in order to satisfy the controller stability conditions (e.g., passivity). We here discuss the feasibility of a novel approach to improve the realism of the haptic rendering while preserving its stability: can cutaneous stimuli be employed to compensate for the lack of kinesthetic feedback required to guarantee the stability of the teleoperation loop? We carried out two experiments to evaluate the role of cutaneous cues in teleoperation and the performance improvement rate when compensating a lack of kinesthesia with cutaneous force. Results showed improved performance while employing the aforementioned compensation technique and a high comfort in using the proposed system

Data compression techniques enable the transmission of highly informative data using little bandwidth. Examples of popular compression formats are Google's VP9 and MPEG's MP3 for video and audio data, respectively. Recently, researchers focused on the applicability of compression techniques for haptic data too. One of these approaches, called the deadband compression approach, transmits new haptic stimuli to the receiver side only when the user is able to actually perceive the change of the stimulus with respect to the previously transmitted one. However, no deadband compression approach has been presented and evaluated for cutaneous stimuli. In this work we extend the deadband approach to cutaneous haptic data. A force-controlled cutaneous device provides the human operator with cutaneous feedback from a virtual environment. A new cutaneous stimulus is applied at the master side only if the human operator is able to sense the change with respect to the previous one. This perceptual threshold is the just notifiable difference (JND). Results show an average bit rate reduction of 61.7% with no performance degradation