Microcontroller-operated anthropomorphic manipulator with haptic feedback

This article presents the design of a cluster-distributed computing system to operate and control an anthropomorphic manipulator with haptic feedback. The system hardware consists of four major building blocks, anthropomorphic manipulator, haptic sensor glove, real-time microcontroller-based cluster distributed computing (CDC) network, and closed-loop controller. The system software architecture consists of three key operation modules, namely, the sensor glove, anthropomorphic manipulator and communication module. It is designed based on a shared file system concept which forms the foundation of the CDC protocol. The key advantages of this system are its novel structure and its comparatively low cost using microcontroller-based distributed cluster networks which allow large-scale expansion/integration.