Sensorimotor Control Sharing With Vibrotactile Feedback for Body Integration Through Avatar Robot

An avatar robot can be operated by multiple users, augmenting the operation of a single user. In this study, we assembled a collaborative operation system for a 7-DoF robotic arm with a gripper controlled by two users. The users share the role of controlling the robot with one user controlling the arm and the other controlling the gripper. The actions of the two users must be seamlessly coordinated to ensure smooth and precise operations. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate vibrotactile feedback to promote recognition of the actions of a partner. A pick-and-place task was considered as a basic operation. First, an intensity adjustment was developed for vibrotactile feedback to ensure linear sensitivity and its usefulness was verified. An estimation test for the reaching motion showed that the target position was estimated accurately based on velocity feedback, indicating that the participants imaged the arm motion. Subsequently, collaboration tests with and without vibrotactile velocity feedback revealed a potential effect of vibrotactile feedback in terms of reducing the time required for completing the target task. Our experimental results indicate that vibrotactile feedback for partner's motion can be applied to achieve smooth collaborative operations using an avatar robot.