Experiments of haptic and tactile display for human telecommunication

We propose a new interactive interface that uses force and tactile information for human telecommunication and for human-machine communication in real environment. The proposed system uses a robot arm as an interface terminal device. Two robot arms are connected through a digital communication line and control each other. A force communication is realized when users attach their arms to the robot arms at both sides of the communication line. A teletactile sensing is performed to touch the surface of the distant object using a master-slave control of the robot arm with tactile sensor and display. Some experiments of the proposed haptic and tactile interface were carried out and promising results were obtained.