Presentation of contact information of industrial robot's end-effector using vibrotactile sensation

Industrial robots are introduced in not only large enterprises but also small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Professional engineers are required when introducing and maintaining industrial robots. However, sometimes it is difficult for SMEs to do this by themselves because of economical limitations. Therefore, in many cases, they need to ask the outside for the support. To assist this situation, an aiding system for remote operation of industrial robots has been studied. This system provides information of the local site to an operator who is in the remote site using auditory and visual information. From this, the operator is able to perceive the working situation of the robot remotely. However, when several kinds of auditory information are presented at same time, recognition of the information becomes difficult. In addition, if too many kinds of visual information are presented, it is also difficult for the operator to pay attention appropriately. To solve the problem, we have proposed vibrotactile interfaces to assist information presentation for aiding remote operation of an industrial robot. In this paper, we attempt to present contact information using a vibrotactile glove when contact between an end-effector of a robot and an object occurs. We proposed two types of vibration stimuli to present the contact information. We investigate how human subjects correctly perceive the contact information through the vibration-based presentations compared with a visual based presentation. Subjects? performance of the contact information perception is evaluated based on perceived time, cognitive time and correct answer rate of the contact information.