The rutgers master II new design force-feed back glove

Abstract—The Rutgers Master II-ND glove is a haptic interface designed for dextrous interactions with virtual environments. The glove provides force feedback up to 16 N each to the thumb, index, middle, and ring fingertips. It uses custom pneumatic actuators ar-ranged in a direct-drive configuration in the palm. Unlike commer-cial haptic gloves, the direct-drive actuators make unnecessary ca-bles and pulleys, resulting in a more compact and lighter structure. The force-feedback structure also serves as position measuring ex-oskeleton, by integrating noncontact Hall-effect and infrared sen-sors. The glove is connected to a haptic-control interface that reads its sensors and servos its actuators. The interface has pneumatic servovalves, signal conditioning electronics, A/D/A boards, power supply and an imbedded Pentium PC. This distributed computing assures much faster control bandwidth than would otherwise be possible. Communication with the host PC is done over an RS232 line. Comparative data with the CyberGrasp commercial haptic glove is presented. Index Terms—Calibration, control, CyberGlove, CyberGrasp, haptic feedback, position sensor, Rutgers Master glove, virtual reality. I