Touch and force reflection for telepresence surgery

This paper describes our on-going work on the development of an advanced telepresence glove, capable of providing touch and force reflection to the human operator. Such a glove will be essential in a telepresence surgery environment. The development of the glove currently constitutes three steps. First, an algorithm is being developed to map human finger motions on to the generally dissimilar robot hands, using the human grasp posture as the reference criteria. Second, a touch reflection system is being built where a set of touch sensors, placed on the robot finger tips, detect touch and activate a set of shape memory alloy based actuators attached to the human finger tips. Third, a force reflection system is being developed where a set of flexible pneumatic tubes, attached to the human fingers, reflect the grasping forces of the remote robot fingers.