Haptics for medical applications

Robots and intelligent machines in future should adapt themselves autonomously to the open environment in order to realize physical support for human activities. In addition, the physical support by them must be based on the individual's "action" and "sensation" in order that the physical support becomes really human-friendly. Then, the robots must actively recognize the unknown environment according to the individual's action. They also have to transmit the obtained environmental information to the individual in harmony with his or her sensation. Since haptic information is so important as well as visual information and auditory information, development of real-world haptics is one of the important key issues for the purpose. Haptic information is inherently bilateral, since an action is always accompanied by a reaction. That means the bilateral control with high transparency is necessary to transmit real-world haptic information artificially. The acceleration-based bilateral controller is one of the solutions for the acquirement of high transparency. There remain many issues to solve for the application of haptics to the physical support for the actual human activities. Haptic system with high transparency should obtain the flexibility in order to extend its function. This paper presents flexible actuation techniques that have high force transferability and flexibility of actuators arrangement. Furthermore, in order to support for human activities in remote environment, bilateral tele-haptics over network is also described. In summary, this paper introduces the fundamental techniques in haptics including several examples of medical applications, since they are the first target of the real-world haptics.