Tactile display with tangential and normal skin displacement for robot assisted surgery

Abstract: This paper proposes a tactile display providing both shear and normal feedback to the fingertip for generating 3 axis tactile feedback during teleoperation of a surgical robot. The display is composed of 5 balloons that are actuated by controlled pneumatic pressure. The size of the implemented display is 18 * 18 *15 mm3. The size is suitable for mounting on the master controls of surgical robot. The normal and shear displacement range were 2 mm and 1.3 mm, respectively. The proposed tactile display could provide perceivable stimuli to a human finger pad in all five directions: normal, distal, proximal, radial, and ulnar directions. This paper also includes psychophysical experiment by measuring the minimum perceivable movement of the developed tactile display for each of the five directions.