The electrical muscle stimulator (EMS) based human machine interface (HMI) free to mechanical constraint and muscle fatigue problems are proposed for force feedback in a virtual reality. The device was designed to provide force feedback up to 4.8 N and 2.6 N each to the thumb and forefingers. The main objective of the HMI is to make unnecessary mechanical structures to attach on the hand or fingers. It employs custom EMSs and an interface arranged in the forearm. In this work, major muscle groups such as extensor pollicis brevis (EPB), extensor indicis proprius (EIP), flexor pollicis longus (FPL) and flexor digitorum profundus (FDP) are selected for efficient force feedback and controlled individually. For this, a human muscular-skeletal analysis was performed and verified. The validity of the proposed multi-channel EMS based HMI was evaluated thorough various experiments with ten human subjects, interacting with a virtual environment.

Though the final goal of mobile robot navigation is to be autonomous, operators intelligent and skillful decisions are necessary when there are many scattered obstacles. There are several limitations even in the camera-based tele-operation of a mobile robot, which is very popular for the mobile robot navigation. For examples, shadowed and curved areas acnnot be viewed using a narrow view-angle camera, especially in bad weather such as on snowy or rainy days. Therefore, it is necessary to have other sensory information for reliable tele-operations. In this paper, sixteen ultrasonic sensors are attached around a mobile robot in a ring pattern to measure the distances to obstacles. Acollision vector is introduced in this paper as a new tool for obstacle avoidance, which is defined as a normal vector from an obstacle to the mobile robot. Based on this collision vector, a virtual reflection force is generated to avoid the obstacles and then the reflection force is transferred to an operator who is holding a joystick to control the mobile robot. Relying on the reflection force, the operator can control the mobile robot more smoothly and safely. For this bi-directional tele-operation, a master joystick system using a hall sensor was designed to resolve the existence of nonlinear sections, which are usual for a general joystick with two motors and potentiometers. Finally, the efficiency of a force reflection joystick is verified through the comparison of two vision-based tele-operation experiments, with and without force reflection.