Recording & Rendering High-Frequency Vibrations Through a Deployable System

In dangerous environments, teleoperation is needed to enable humans to execute tasks remotely. To assist in these tasks, haptic teleoperation systems provide the human operator with the sense of touch of the telerobot. One way to provide this sense of touch is through high-frequency vibration feedback. State-of-the-art solutions generally rely...

Virtual environment and its ground surface can influence locomotion while being immersed in virtual reality

Immersive virtual reality (IVR) is an artificially designed environment that can be used to produce realistic and engaging environments which are being used actively in the field of healthcare through training and rehabilitation. The use of IVR nowadays ranges from training surgical operations in a safe environment to neurorehabilitation. IVR...

Human-centered robotisation at KLM Engines: A co-design tool for FRAIM & KLM Engines to explore and evaluate the possibilities & limitations of robotising the workflow

The demand for robots in the industry is increasing. Organisations acknowledge the need to innovate in order to keep up with the competition. When robots were first introduced, they took over human tasks if they could execute the task faster than humans. However, this often has a negative effect on the meaningfulness of work. That’s why cobots...

A Better Grasp on the Asymmetrical Adaptation of Grip Force in Response to Friction Perturbations

Our remarkable sense of touch provides us the feedback that is crucial for successfully manipulating a wide range of objects.<br/>The unconscious synergy between touch and the precision grip is particularly astonishing.<br/>During precision manipulation, humans constantly control their grip force to maintain a safety margin of approximately 25...

Pseudo Potential Fields on Surface-Haptic Touchscreens using Friction Modulation

It is impossible to imagine modern day interaction with technology without the use of touchscreens. It is a go-to interface to use for many applications, because of the high stimuli-response compatibility and adaptability of the graphical user interface. But the haptic feedback one would have with physical buttons and dials, is lost with the use...

FeelPen: A Handheld Multimodal Haptic Interface for Displaying Augmented Texture Feels on Touchscreens

The ever-emerging mobile market induced a blooming interest in stylus-based interactions. However, most state-of-the-art styli are passive or display only unimodal tactile feedback. Multimodal haptic devices that simultaneously stimulate our cutaneous and kinesthetic receptors to provide immersive and realistic sensations in a virtual...

The influence of user exploration on the perception of spatio-temporal thermal patterns

Thermal feedback has been proven to enhance the user experience in human-machine interaction. However, state-of-the-art technology mainly focuses on static contact using either palm or fingertip, overlooking dynamic and multi-finger interactions. Underlying challenges include incompatible designs of the conventional interfaces for providing...

Combining Manipulability and Fatigue for Multi-Metric Authority Arbitration of Physical Human-Robot Collaboration: A Proof of Concept

Human-robot interaction is a growing field that aims to research and develop communication channels between humans and robots to enhance comfort, safety, and productivity in healthcare, the household, and the industry. Researchers have considered ergonomy-related metrics to compose these channels for physical human-robot collaborative scenarios....

Impact of control authority on the drivers' perceived responsibility: a haptic shared control driving study

More and more vehicles have multiple advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), that take over tasks from the human driver, thereby taking the driver out of the loop of control. This might create a discrepancy between the responsibility that the human driver feels and the responsibility that is attributed to them when something goes wrong....

Balancing Long-term Plasticity Mechanisms at the Purkinje Cell in the Olivocerebellar System

The olivocerebellar system plays a crucial role in control of movements of the human body in terms of coordination, precision and timing. Long-term plasticity is directly linked to motor learning and control. In this research, we developed a phenomenological model of the olivocerebellar system with balancing of long-term potentiation (LTP) and...

Scene Classification for a Mobile Interactive Robot

The use of social robots increased in the past few years. Current technology, however, lacks in deploying a single robot for different applications without the help of a human being. Current solutions are time-consuming, labour intensive and hard to generalize. Being aware of its surroundings, in terms of environment and context, the robot can...

The coupling effect in bilateral tele-impedance: Beneficial or detrimental for unstructured environment interaction?

Tele-impedance augments classical teleoperation by enabling the human operator to actively command remote robot stiffness. Hereby, an essential strategy used by humans to successfully interact with the unstructured environment complements remote robot-environment interaction. However, literature lacks awareness of benefits and disbenefits of...

Is breaking it down better?: Enhancing motor learning via controlled sensory-motor integration

Complex motions are generally accepted as movements which consists of at least 2 Degrees of Freedom (DoFs) actuated in a coordinated manner, which takes more than one practice session to be mastered, and that are ecologically valid (see Wulf et al. 2002 for a clear statement). <br/><br/>The techniques to teach and re-teach (also, (re-)learn) a...

Multimodal Sensor-Fusion for Context-Aware Semi-Autonomous Control of a Multi Degree-of-Freedom Upper Limb Prosthesis

Objective. Dexterous control of myoelectric upper limb prosthesis is still limited by the capabilities of the modern human-machine interfaces. The first goal of the current work was to develop a system that supplements the academic myoelectric state-of-the-art interface during the interaction with objects (e.g., grasping, manipulation) with the...

Online Time-Varying Identification and Detection of Operator Adaptation with Recursive ARX Models

Identifying the time-varying, adapting human operator online could enable adaptive human-machine support systems and attention monitoring for human-in-the-loop vehicle control tasks. A validated, online identification method, including adaptation detection is missing, however.<br/><br/>In this MSc thesis project, online human operator...

Design and real-world evaluation of three types of haptic lane-keeping support systems for truck drivers

Designing lane-keeping assistance (LKA) systems that are both effective and well-liked by drivers is a highly challenging process, that is not well understood. This is illustrated by a wide variety of market releases of LKA systems, and a large body of literature illustrating different designs and various evaluation methodologies that are often...