Joshua Brown

The remote operation of underwater vehicles at depth is complicated by the presence of invisible and unpredictable environmental disturbances such as cross-currents. Communicating the presence of these disturbances to an operator on the surface is made more difficult by the nature of the disturbance and the lack of visible features to highlight in the visual display presented to the operator. Here we explore the use of a novel interactive soft haptic touchpad that utilizes vibration and particle jamming to provide information about the presence and direction of cross-currents to the operator of an ROV (remotely operated vehicle). An in water experiment using a thruster-based ROV and artificially generated cross-current was performed with non-expert ROV operators to evaluate the effectiveness of multimodal haptic feedback to communicate complex environmental information during high-risk operations. Advanced haptic displays can signal both the presence of external factors as well as their direction, information that can enhance operational performance as well as reduce operator cognitive load. Using haptic feedback resulted in a statistically significant reduction in cognitive load of 24.3% and increase in positioning accuracy of 28.3% for novice operators. Deviation from an ideal path was also reduced by 29.5% for experienced operators when using haptic feedback compared to without. While this experiment took place in controlled conditions with a fixed direction cross-current and haptic interface, this approach could be extended to communicate real-time environmental information in real-world unstructured environments.

Particle jamming is an emergent technology widely used to create haptic devices that can change their physical stiffness to render hard or soft surfaces. Conventional implementations of particle jamming-based interfaces have relied on bulky and expensive vacuum systems to force the particles together. This paper presents designs for two alternative, mechatronic approaches to activating a particle jamming-based haptic interface. Each design is subjected to a battery of mechanical tests to evaluate the range and uniformity of the achievable hardness change and response time. Results are presented and the effectiveness of these designs is considered against established pneumatic approaches.

Dealing safely with nuclear waste is an imperative for the nuclear industry. Increasingly, robots are being developed to carry out complex tasks such as perceiving, grasping, cutting, and manipulating waste. Radioactive material can be sorted, and either stored safely or disposed of appropriately, entirely through the actions of remotely controlled robots. Radiological characterisation is also critical during the decommissioning of nuclear facilities. It involves the detection and labelling of radiation levels, waste materials, and contaminants, as well as determining other related parameters (e.g., thermal and chemical), with the data visualised as 3D scene models. This paper overviews work by researchers at the QMUL Centre for Advanced Robotics (ARQ), a partner in the UK EPSRC National Centre for Nuclear Robotics (NCNR), a consortium working on the development of radiation-hardened robots fit to handle nuclear waste. Three areas of nuclear-related research are covered here: human–robot interfaces for remote operations, sensor delivery, and intelligent robotic manipulation.

Whilst common in devices ranging from smart-phones to game controllers, vibrotactile feedback has generally been limited to providing a uniform sensation across a tactile surface. We propose a haptic interface based on the emerging physical effect of particle jamming with both vibrotactile and shape changing outputs, which can be extended in space to create haptic surfaces and devices with shape and vibrotactile responses localised to one part of the device. This paper gives an overview of the physical principles behind this technology and presents detailed performance metrics obtained from a working prototype. These include experimental characterization of the relationships between air pressure and electric motor power and vibration amplitude and frequency which show that it is possible to control vibrotactile amplitude and frequency independently.