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Immersion 3D Contracts with the U.S. NAVY and Stanford University to Develop Telerobotic Tools

The Navy's SBIR Program is primarily a mission oriented program providing companies the opportunity to become part of the national technology base that can feed both the military and private sectors of the nation.

The U.S. NAVY is contracting for the additional development of the CyberGrasp™ force-feedback option that could be used by the Department of Defense or other parties as an interface for several telerobotic applications such as: underwater salvage operations, hazardous waste removal, oceanographic exploration, telesurgery, etc. Moreover, CyberGrasp combined with the CyberGlove® can serve as an intuitive interface for virtual reality training and simulation of DoD personnel, astronauts, technicians, equipment operators, medical students, etc.

This is a very cool project! We partnered with Stanford University with the goal of coupling CyberGrasp with a mating arm force feedback device. We then developed the software to control both products using the VirtualHand® Suite 2000. Stanford further assisted us in the testing the devices in a telerobotic environment.

Telerobotics means controlling a robot directly using some kind of input device instead of programming it to do a specific task. Since many tasks are quite complicated, it would be virtually impossible to program a robot to perform reliably in those conditions. Therefore, direct human control is often required.

The equipment that we put together for this contract is probably one of the more advanced telerobotic set-ups in the world. The team at Stanford built a two-fingered robot named "Dexter" (see photo). This mini-robot was attached to a large Adept™ Industrial robot. Whenever the user moves his hand, the movement is measured by the CyberGlove and sent to the robots so that they can move in a corresponding manner. Dexter has force sensors at each tip. Whenever the robot touches something, the contact force is measured and sent back to the CyberGrasp so that the user can actually "feel" what the robot is touching. Very cool stuff. There are still some kinks to iron out but the system looks promising and represents the future of telerobotics.