CombX: Design of a Haptic Device for Teleoperation *

A haptic device which can provide force and torque outputs is preferred in teleoperation, virtual reality, etc. The dilemma for researchers is that such a haptic device is not easily accessible: the commercial products are expensive to buy, while the state-of-the-art research prototypes are difficult to reproduce outside the original laboratories. This paper presents the design and preliminary experimentation of a haptic device, the CombX, with both force and torque outputs. The CombX is constructed from two TouchX haptic devices that only generate force outputs at their styluses. Since the TouchX's original stylus does not allow effective connection between two TouchX devices, a new stylus is carefully designed and fabricated via 3D printing, to replace the original styluses. An optimization for determining the arrangement of the two TouchX devices was performed to maximize the workspace. Positioning precisions and orientation workspace of the CombX were experimentally examined. The future work mainly includes the calibration and characterizations of the CombX's force and torque output capabilities, in order to fully verify the effectiveness of the proposed idea.