Remote haptic feedback from a dynamic running machine

In this paper we present our efforts to design a system for feeding back useful haptic information from a highly dynamic running robot to a remote operator using a haptic device. Without adding additional sensors, the legs of the robot are used as feelers to give the operator the capability to both explore and manipulate the robot's environment and to gather meaningful information about properties not captured by visual feedback like weight, movability and structure of an encountered object. We show the capabilities of the system in a user study with both trained and untrained operators.