Wearable Fabric Actuator Inducing Shoulder Movements for Directional Guidance of Hand Movements

In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on teleoperation of robots via immersive environments. These systems require haptic sensation to the hand for intuitive teleoperation. However, most methods for providing haptic sensation to the hand may interfere with hand position acquisition by vision and other devices. Thus, there is a need for a method that can coexist with the acquisition of hand information. This paper presents a method for guiding directions of hand movements in immersive environments using McKibben-based haptic sensations, which can coexist with the acquisition of hand information. The proposed system employs a wearable fabric actuator consisting of four McKibben-type artificial muscles that induce internal rotation, external rotation, internal abduction, and external abduction of the shoulder. By combining these four haptic sensations, the proposed system can guide the direction of hand movements without interfering with hand information acquisition by other devices. An algorithm is implemented to effectively combine the four haptic sensations based on the target guiding direction. We evaluated the accuracy and speed of the proposed system through a participant experiment.