On June 5that 21:10 CEST, the European Space Agency's Telerobotics and Haptics Laboratory conducted the first in history haptic handshake between space and Earth. This demonstration was part of the Haptics-2 experiment, which makes use of two haptic joysticks; one located in space on-board the International Space Station (ISS), and the other one on ground at ESA's laboratory in the Netherlands. Both systems can be connected through the TDRSS geosynchronous satellites via a real-time data link with sufficient performance to perform haptic teleoperation tests. This paper describes the mechatronic design of the haptic devices, the software and the system implementation required for the Haptics-2 experiment. It reports results of a real-time high-frequency characterization of the satellite data-link indicating a round-trip time delay of approximately 850 milliseconds and presents mechatronic performance data of the haptic joysticks. Moreover, the paper presents experimental results from the first haptic handshake conducted between space and ground with astronauts on-board the ISS.

The CyberGrasp™ is a well known dataglove-exoskeleton device combination that allows to render haptic feedback to the human fingers. Its design, however, restricts its usability for teleoperation through a limited control bandwidth and position sensor resolution. Therefore the system is restricted to low achievable contact stiffness and feedback gain magnitudes in haptic rendering. Moreover, the system prohibits simple adaption of its controller implementation. In this paper, the ExHand Box is presented, a newly designed back-end to widen the CyberGraspTM's bandwidth restrictions and to open it up for fully customized controller implementations. The ExHand Box provides a new computer, interface electronics and motor controllers for the otherwise unmodified CyberGloveand CyberGraspTMhand systems. The loop frequency of the new system can be freely varied up to 2 kHz and custom controllers can be implemented through an automatic code generation interface. System performance identification experiments are presented that demonstrate improved behavior in hard contact situations over a range of sampling periods. Maximum contact stiffnesses of up to 50kN/m in a stable condition are demonstrated, which is significantly higher than what could be achieved with the non-customized original system version. Moreover, a bilateral control experiment is conducted to demonstrate the new system's usability for generic teleoperation research. In this experiment a raycasting algorithm is introduced for pre-contact detection in order to compensate for high delay and jitter communication links between master and slave as they appear in an Ethernet network. It is demonstrated that the contact stiffness can be maintained in the order of magnitude of the system performance identification with a demonstrated stiffness of 41kN/m in a stable condition.