From Haptics
Haptics Laboratory
Haptics, the sense of touch, is crucial for human exploration and manipulation of the world. In medicine and rehabilitation, haptic interaction is often necessary for reasons of performance, safety, and user acceptance. Our research is devoted to developing the principles and tools needed to realize advanced robotic and human-machine systems capable of haptic interaction. We are particularly interested in:
- Teleoperation: Devices, models, and control systems that allow human operators to manipulate environments that are remote in scale and/or distance. Prostheses can also be considered a form of teleoperator.
- Virtual Environments: Specialized models, simulators, control systems, and devices that enable compelling touch-based interaction with computers (e.g., surgical simulators and planners).
- Robotic Manipulation: Robots that physically manipulate their environment or their own shape, incorporating novel designs, touch sensors, and control systems.
We design and study haptic systems using both analytical and experimental approaches. This research has applications in many areas, including robot-assisted surgery, simulation and training, rehabilitation, exploration of hazardous or remote environments, enabling technologies, manufacturing, design, mobile computing, and education. A major theme of our work is biomedical systems.
Sponsors of our work include the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Insitutes of Health (NIH), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA), and the Whitaker Foundation. The lab director is Prof. Allison Okamura.
The Haptics Lab is part of the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics and Prof. Okamura's primary appointment is in Mechanical Engineering. Our lab members are also affiliated with Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Electrical and Computer Engineering.
