• teleoperazione
• tatto
• robotic teleoperation
• softness and texture reproduction
• riproduzione di morbidezza e rugosità di superfici
• restituzione tattile
• interfaccia aptica
• human-robot interaction
• haptic rendering
• aptica

The aim of this thesis is to design and engineer a tactile display for softness and texture rendering to be used as a master in human-robot and teleoperation applications. In recent years, many types of teleoperation approaches, i.e. the control of a machine at a distance, have been developed using haptic interfaces to control a virtual simulated / remote manipulator.
Among the different haptic properties to be rendered, softness plays a crucial role to guarantee an effective interaction with a remote environment. Furthermore, haptics research has produced several efforts to understand and recreate high-frequency texture information to improve the quality of haptic feedback in both real and virtual environments.
To the best of our knowledge, trying to reproduce both these types of information in a haptic device for teleoperation tasks is still an unexplored topic. In this thesis, we designed and fabricated a novel fabric-based device, hereinafter referred as FYD Touchpad, that can be used to tele-operate a remote robot (through the tracking of the contact area) and to convey haptic stimuli.
More specifically, this system is able to perform digital texture rendering through Pulse Width Modulation of two DC motors. Additionally, while softness information is conveyed by modulating the stretching state of the fabric, the dynamic movement of the user finger on the elastic fabric allows to remotely control a robot linked through a network, by tracking contact area location on the fabric. At the same time, the user can experience texture and softness information the robot end effector is sensing at the remote-side. The device can be easily interfaced with different manipulators since it communicates with external robots using a protocol based on packet exchange, with both wired and wireless networks. The haptic interface was tested using a KUKA 7-DoF manipulator for remote control. Several objects with different combined
softness and roughness properties were remotely explored. Their properties were then suitably
reproduced by FYD Touchpad. Experimental results on the correlation between the signals on the master and slave side show the effectiveness of the here proposed system and techniques.