Differences in coordination between dominant and non-dominant hands in tele-operation.

The intuitive tele-operation of industrial robot arms is necessary for the teaching of autonomous movement. We developed a novel interface, namely the iFeel Desktop Haptic Device, for operating robots intuitively. However, when a user uses two interfaces with two hands, there are differences in coordination between the dominant and non-dominant hands. In this paper, we investigated the differences in coordination between dominant and non-dominant hands using two devices for the development of cooperative control. In an experiment, when the participants manipulated the two interfaces to operate a virtual tracking system, we measured the tracking error in each degree of freedom (i.e., X, Y, Z, pitch, yaw, and roll directions). The results show that there were significant differences between the dominant and non-dominant hands for movement in the X, Y, Z, and pitch directions. We conclude that the operations that involve more body parts have a greater difference between dominant and non-dominant hands.