Tactile Telerobots for Dull, Dirty, Dangerous, and Inaccessible Tasks

The sense of touch, which is essential for human dexterity, is virtually absent from today's robotic hands. In this work we present progress in creating a highly-dexterous bimanual tactile telerobot, and evaluate its performance compared to bare human hands. The system, consisting of anthropomorphic robot hands, biomimetic tactile sensors, and advanced haptic gloves, enables a human operator to intuitively control and feel what the robotic hands are touching. Through carefully tuned tactile and kinematic mapping it was possible to intuitively perform dexterous operations, including pick and place tasks and even in-hand manipulation, a challenge for most autonomous robotic hands. Performance of the system was evaluated in standard measures of human and robotic dexterity such as the Box and Block test and other YCB benchmarks. This first-generation telerobot was found to have promising performance with the pilot able to do the same tasks in the telerobot between 1/4th to 1/12th the speed of their bare hands depending on the task complexity.