Wire-Driven Pneumatic Actuation of a New 6-DOF Haptic Master

The paper presents the results of a work carried out by the Department of Mechanics of Politecnico di Torino, concerning the study and development of a six degrees of freedom force reflecting master structure for teleoperation (haptic device) to be controlled by an operator. The latter imposes the six-dimensional linear and angular displacement of a handle, controlling a remote slave robot or interacting with virtual reality. On the other hand, the operator receives a force feedback related to the environment in which the slave robot or virtual device operates. Since the actuators must be force controlled in order to generate a resultant corresponding to the desired wrench, pneumatic actuation has been chosen because it is particularly suitable to the application and quite economical.