There’s a nice article over at the Singularity Hub that’s a round-up of currently-available haptics devices. They seem primarily excited over the prospects of haptics in gaming, but there are two reasons we’re interested in developments.
First is simply telerobotics, as in Feynman Path manipulation. We want the feedback to help develop an intuitive feel for mechanism at all the scales from here to molecular.
The second is for robotics/AI. A haptic telerobot control means that all the signals, motor and sensory alike, have to be handled and transmitted. It’s all too common in robotics to try to get away with too little feedback, and it’s much worse in the upper levels of AI. Any trend in full-duplex control software is likely to contribute to the development of robust AI, IMHO.
