Cutaneous haptic feedback for robotics and Virtual Reality
Abstract
Haptic feedback is a valuable tool for robotics and virtual interaction at large, spanning a great range of high-impact scenarios, including manipulation, human-robot interaction, medical robotics, microrobotics, and immersive environments. The benefits of haptic feedback include increased manipulation and perception accuracy, decreased completion time, decreased peak and mean force applied to the remote/virtual environment, increased immersion and user’s experience. These important characteristics have made haptic feedback one of the most anticipated and wanted feature in many fields of application, including robotics and Virtual Reality. This presentation addresses my contributions to the field of cutaneous haptics, presenting my research in the design and development of haptic interfaces and rendering techniques as well as their application for ground robotic manipulation, mobile robotics, medical and assistive robotics, and Virtual and Augmented Reality. My presentation takes this journey by describing four representative families of haptic interfaces and discusses how they impact the field of robotics and immersive environments. I conclude with general perspectives on the main scientific and technological challenges that this field of research faces in the next future.
Biosketch
Claudio Pacchierotti is a tenured researcher of the CNRS in Rennes, France.
He was previously a postdoctoral researcher of the Dept. Advanced Robotics at the Italian Institute of Technology, Genova, Italy. Pacchierotti earned his Ph.D. degree at the University of Siena in 2014 and his HDR at the University of Rennes 1 in 2022. He visited the Penn Haptics Group at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014, the Dept. Innovation in Mechanics and Management of the University of Padua in 2013, and the Institute for Biomedical Technology and Technical Medicine (MIRA) of the University of Twente in 2014. Pacchierotti received the 2014 EuroHaptics Best PhD Thesis Award for the best doctoral thesis in the field of haptics, and the 2015 Meritorious Service Award for his work as a Reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Haptics. He has also been part of the Organization Committee for various haptic conferences, including member of the Editorial Board for Eurohaptics 2022. He is Senior Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics and Secretary of the Eurohaptics Society.