ABSTRACT

In our everyday life, we are used to handling various objects, heavy or light, solid or fragile, rigid or deformable. In general, we neither break them nor deform them. Moreover, we are able to recognize them just by assessing their shape, weight, texture, and temperature. Yet this sense of touch has not been reproduced to date, even with the most advanced robot technology. While modern technology is able to create or reconstitute a virtual environment, to synthesize sounds and fragrances, designing an artificial hand able to permanently adapt the pressure of its fingers to the nature of the object it grasps is hardly possible in most cases. With regard to the simulation of tactile sensations, some haptic systems that generate forces and vibrations corresponding to the hardness and texture of the object touched have begun to appear, but are far too simple to represent the complexity of contact between a finger and a visco-elastic material. These “force feedback” systems have only recently begun to appear in surgery to allow the surgeon performing surgery to sense tactile sensations in the course of telesurgery experiments.