A Multi-Point Cutaneous Tactile Device for Fingertip Haptics

抄録

Fingertip haptic feedback devices reproduce the sensation of touching objects in a virtual or remote environment to the operator, but most existing devices were proposed through a specific purpose and treat the cutaneous interaction as a point force rather than as distributed sensations. Although there are some devices which can reproduce the distribution sensations, these devices are difficult to combine the transmission system with portability very well. To solve these problems, we propose a wearable multi-point cutaneous tactile feedback device, which can reproduce different shapes and contact forces of virtual objects by using hydraulic transmission to generate physical displacement at a user's finger pad with shape-displaying method. The device consists of a tactor-array module with a widely range amplitude of 7mm used to display shapes and exert forces at the finger pad, an execution module responsible for implementing the output of the reproduction, and a circuit control module used for data processing and converting. In a virtual environment, we used a virtual spring mechanism to simulate the flexibility of the virtual finger pad and demonstrate the detection of virtual objects. An extrusion-force-deformation curve of a real finger pad was experimentally obtained and converted to allow the device to reproduce virtual contact forces at the user's finger pad. We carried out two primary interaction experiments to verify the feasibility and performance of the proposed device. The results showed that this device can display different shape patterns and reproduce the virtual contact forces at the user's finger pad.