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Abstract

This paper discusses the completed work in designing a master-slave haptic gripper system aiming to recreate the relative hardness feeling of different real test objects at the slave gripper to the user at the master gripper. The main contribution of this paper is to prove the feasibility of recreating the relative hardness feeling of real objects to the users as oppose to recreating the hardness feeling of virtual objects which has been proven to be feasible for quite some time. Three experiments involving twenty test subjects and fifteen pairs of test object combinations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the master-slave haptic gripper system. Experiments show that users at the master gripper end are able to differentiate the relative hardness level of the test objects handled by the slave gripper. The secondary contribution of this paper is the introduction of haptic index defined as a set of numerical value that describe the otherwise immeasurable subjective relative hardness level of an object felt by human. The proposed haptic index can contribute towards designing better robots and controllers that can feel the relative hardness of objects like in the human world.

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