A Modular Wearable Finger Interface for Cutaneous and Kinesthetic Interaction: Control and Evaluation

Abstract

A modular wearable finger interface for cutaneous and kinesthetic interaction: control and evaluation.Abstract-We present a novel modular wearable interface for haptic interaction and robotic teleoperation. It is composed of a 3-DoF fingertip cutaneous device and a 1-DoF finger kinesthetic exoskeleton, which can be either used together as a single device or separately as two different devices. The 3-DoF fingertip device is composed of a static body and a mobile platform. The mobile platform is capable of making and breaking contact with the finger pulp and re-angle to replicate contacts with arbitrarily oriented surfaces. The 1-DoF finger exoskeleton provides kinesthetic force to the proximal and distal interphalangeal finger articulations using one servo motor grounded on the proximal phalanx. This paper presents the wearable device as well as three different position, force, and compliance control schemes, together with their evaluations. We also present three human subjects experiments, enrolling a total of 40 different participants: the first experiment considered a curvature discrimination task, the second one a robotassisted palpation task, and the third one an immersive experience in Virtual Reality. Results showed that providing cutaneous and kinesthetic feedback through our device significantly improved the performance of all the considered tasks. Moreover, although cutaneous-only feedback showed promising performance, adding kinesthetic feedback improved most metrics. Finally, subjects ranked our device as highly wearable, comfortable, and effective.

Crowd Navigation in VR: Exploring Haptic Rendering of Collisions

“…Pacchierotti et al [36] presented a review paper on wearable haptic devices used to render contact sensations at the fingertip and hand. Notable examples of this technology used for VR applications are [12], [14], [41], [43]. Collisions are of course not limited to the hand, especially when dealing with crowded environments.…”

Integrating Tactile Feedback Technologies Into Home-Based Telerehabilitation: Opportunities and Challenges in Light of COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Since then, multiple tactile devices with lightweight and compact mechanisms have been developed to produce pressure stimulation, thereby providing a range of tactile sensations including natural touch (Caldwell et al, 1999 ; Chinello et al, 2015 ; Culbertson et al, 2018a ), roughness (Kim et al, 2009 ), softness (Frediani and Carpi, 2020 ), and texture (Sarakoglou et al, 2005 ; Kyung and Park, 2007 ; Kim et al, 2009 ; Garcia-Hernandez et al, 2011 ). In addition, pressure stimulation was used for conveying directional cues (Raitor et al, 2017 ; Agharese et al, 2018 ), and for rendering shape in virtual and remote environments (Chinello et al, 2019 ).…”

Haptic Augmentation Towards a Smart Learning Environment: The Haptic Lever Design

“…Son and Park designed an interface in the form of a glove [36] for the manipulation of variable size virtual objects with kinesthetic feedback on the fingers and cutaneous feedback on palm and fingers. Chinello et al presented a wearable finger interface with a kinesthetic and a cutaneous module [37]. The device consisted of a 3 degrees of freedom (DoF) platform that got in contact with the fingertip for combined feedback.…”