Fingertip Haptics

The Relationship Between Tactile Sensations and Hand Motion

Preliminary Testing:

This is a close-up of the testing device. Subjects feel either a fixed, flat surface (as shown) through an aperture in the plate, or the surface swings out of the way to allow us to replace the surface with a rotating drum during testing.

 We designed the apparatus to accommodate three main testing criteria. The first is the ability to transmit the surface velocity caused by movement of the user's arm to the fingertip via a rotating drum. To keep the apparatus simple, we use a pair of RollerBlade™ wheels to mechanically transmit the velocity. The upper wheel is fixed to a shaft that turns the contact drum. The shaft itself rests in bearings mounted in an upper fixture that may adjust up and down to accommodate a larger or smaller upper wheel diameter (and thus enabling some adjustment of the ratio of the drum surface velocity to the arm velocity). Also, using a separate drum as the contact drum rather than using the upper wheel itself gives us independent control of the contact drum radius and surface velocity.
The testing apparatus provides a means to change other aspects of the contact sensation between the finger and the rotating drum. Current experimentation involves changing the aperture size to reveal a relationship between the ability to identify the surface and contact area. Future testing will reveal a relationship with skewed relative velocity and the strength of the haptic illusion of a surface - something this test apparatus can already accommodate.

The complete results from preliminary testing are available here.

Recent Publications:

Salada, M. A., Colgate, J. E., Lee, M. V., Vishton, P. M., "Validating a Novel Approach to Rendering Fingertip Contact Sensations," Proceedings of the 10th IEEE Virtual Reality Haptics Symposium, Orlando FL, March 24th and 25th, pp. 217-224, 2002

Salada, M. A., Colgate, J. E., Lee, M. V., Vishton, P. M., "Fingertip Haptics: A Novel Direction in Haptic Display," Proceedings of the 8th Mechatronics Forum International Conference, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands, June 24th - 26th, pp. 1211-1220, 2002

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