A Tactile Display Presenting Pressure Distribution and Slippage Force

Application of tangential skin displacement at the fingertip has been shown to be effective in communicating direction and has potential for several applications. We have developed a portable, fingertip-mounted tactile display capable of displacing and stretching the skin of the fingerpad, using a 7 mm hemispherical tactor. In vivo tests of fingerpad skin stiffness were performed to determine the forces required to effectively render stimuli. Other design parameters such as stimulus speed and displacement were derived from our earlier work. The tactile display is capable of rendering \pm 1 mm of displacement at arbitrary orientations within a plane and with rates of approximately 5 mm/s. Compliance and backlash in the device's drive train were characterized using external measurements, and were compensated for in software to reduce the impact on device hysteresis.

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How Tactor Size and Density of Normal Indentation Tactile Displays Affects Grating Discrimination Tasks

Garcia-Hernandez

Bertolotto²,

Cannella

et al. 2014

IEEE Trans. Haptics

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Tactile fingertip devices of vertically moving tactors have two important design parameters that significantly affect physical feedback and human tactile perception: tactor size and tactor density. However, there are a limited number of research studies that have evaluated the effect of these parameters on human tactile perception. This paper investigated the influence and interaction of these two parameters on a discrimination task. The task consisted of discriminating the spatial-period of sinusoidal gratings through the use of passive-guided touch. In two complementary experiments 40 participants performed the discrimination task under two different tactile conditions: (I) using direct bare fingertip sensing (baseline condition), and (II) using tactile displays with different tactor spacings and diameters. In both experiments differences between and within subjects were considered for Condition II, and for all test conditions the spatial-period Weber fraction for each participant was measured. Results from both experiments were consistent in indicating that tactile performance improves as tactor spacing is decreased and tactor diameter is increased. However, tactor spacings below 1.1 mm might not result in any significant further improvement. The findings of this study might help designers to choose design parameters for tactile displays based upon the cost-benefit of tactor density versus perceptual performance.

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A Tactile Display Presenting Pressure Distribution and Slippage Force

Cited by 3 publications

References 7 publications

Enhancing haptic representation for 2D objects

Enhancing haptic representation for 2D objects

Design of a Fingertip-Mounted Tactile Display with Tangential Skin Displacement Feedback

How Tactor Size and Density of Normal Indentation Tactile Displays Affects Grating Discrimination Tasks

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