Design and fabrication of a haptic touch pad for robotic applications

Abstract

One of the most important senses for robots working in non-vision enviroment is the touch sense. Robotic assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery, which replaces the surgeon's hands by specially designed robotic instruments, removed such precious way of communication between the surgeon and the patient's body during the surgery. The objective of this project is to design and fabricate a fesible haptic pad prototype. A 12-pins array was designed, fabricated and tested to show the feasibility of the concept for large pin array. The prototype consists of 12 linear actuators assembled tightly. 4 actuators are grouped by 1 control circuit and 3 groups are connected in parallel. The actuators drive the pins individually by changing the potentiometer to simulate the force feedback of a tactile sensor. The center spacing of pins is 2.5mm and pin diameter is 0.9mm. The prototype can achieve a fine resolution of 0.04mm with the maximum actuating distance of 2mm