Designing an Encountered-type Haptic Display for Multiple Fingertip Contacts Based on the Observation of Human Grasping Behaviors

Abstract

Unlike conventional haptic devices, an encountered-type device is not held by a user all the time. Instead, the device remains at the location of a virtual object and waits for the user to encounter it. In this paper, we extend this concept to fingertip contacts and design an encountered-type haptic display for multiple fingertip contacts to simulate tasks of grasping an object with any shape and size. Before designing the device, we intensively observed human grasping behaviors. This observation was very helpful to determine the mechanism of the device. An encountered-type device for three-fingered grasping was actually prototyped based on our design.

A Fingertip Haptic Display for Improving Curvature Discrimination

“…Early work in this direction included the surface display described by Hirota and Hirose (1993), while Yokokohji, Hollis, and Kanade (1999) and Yokokohji, Muramori, Sato, and Yoshikawa (2005) developed a robotic system that can orient mobile surfaces on the tangent planes to the simulated virtual object at the contact points with the finger. Among the local properties of the contact surface, curvature represents an important requisite to our perception of shape.…”

Reach+

“…However, EHDs have limitations that lead to visuo-haptic discrepancies, including limited workspace volumes, positional inaccuracy, and low speeds that may not be able to support real-time interactions. While there has been considerable work on the motion planning [42,54,56] and design [57] of novel EHDs, there has been less focus on hardware limitations that tend to make their use challenging. Some researchers have explored the use of multiple robots to better enable just-in-time haptics [24,47] and dynamically assemble props [61], the additional cost and complexity of a multirobot system may still be impractical, and individual device limitations (e.g., accuracy, speed) may still negatively impact system performance.…”

Haptic Rendering of Juggling with Encountered Type Interfaces

“…In Solazzi, Frisoli, Salsedo, and Bergamasco (2006) the device has a plate end-effector that is put in contact with the fingertip with an angle that depends on the surface of the virtual object. Multiple finger interaction has been proposed by Yokokohji, Muramori, Sato, and Yoshikawa (2005), adopting a patch surface for every finger.…”