An End to End Tactile Cyber Physical System Design

We describe design and implementation of an end to end Tactile Cyber Physical System (TCPS). We begin with proposing a generic architecture for TCPSs. We then describe a typical system in which a robotic arm at one end of the network replicates the posture of a human hand at the other end with a tactile glove. For the human operator end, we design a tactile glove having Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors for motion capture and vibrotactile actuators for tactile feedback. On the teleoperator end, we use a PhantomX reactor robotic arm with force sensors and design an inverse kinematic engine for this. We also provide a mechanism for visual feedback using a USB camera on the teleoperator end. We describe in detail the hardware and software designs of the tactile glove and the controller board for the robot. We also detail the industrial design of the tactile glove. We perform detail experiments to characterize the tactile glove, robotic arm and round-trip delay of the TCPS implementation.