A Dual Arm Haptic Exoskeleton for Dynamical Coupled Manipulation

Most activities of daily living require bimanual motor coordination during interactions with the external environment. Recent advancements in haptics and virtual reality provide researchers with new instruments to study human-robot interaction and implement experimental paradigms to involve multiple degrees of freedom in the simulation of complex interactive environments. We developed a pick and place task on a bimanual 6 DoFs exoskeleton to explore, for the first time, dynamical coupled motor strategies in a 3D workspace. The robot rendered the force feedback resulting from the interaction with a variety of virtual objects. We tested healthy subjects during several experimental conditions corresponding to multiple simulated dynamics. Results highlighted the system ability in reproducing virtual materials of different stiffness. The dependency of subjects’ performance on the virtual objects’ properties and targets’ direction has also been detected, suggesting that providing haptic rendering on a wearable bimanual exoskeleton could represent a starting point for the development of a fully customized and measurable haptic environment.