Improving diver-robot empathy with a haptic feedback smart glove

Abstract

We have developed a diver-robot empathetic communication system that allows the diver to feel the disturbance around the robot and control the robot remotely using hand gestures. The underwater robot is embedded with soft dielectric elastomer (DE) sensors to sense the direction and amplitude of the disturbance around its surroundings, defined as the physical indentation of the eye sensors. The direction and intensity of the disturbance communicate to the user remotely via an array of vibrotactile actuators in the form of a bracelet. Wears of the glove will feel what the robot is going through, represented by different vibration intensities and patterns. The smart glove employs five dielectric elastomer sensors to capture finger motion and implements a machine-learning classifier in the onboard electronics to recognize gestures. Hence allowing the wearer to send commands in the form of hand gestures for correcting the underwater robot’s posture. The system will be tested in a user study to determine performance improvement over the traditional robotic control interface. Our work has demonstrated the capability of DE sensing for advanced human-machine interaction.