指先の皮膚感覚による凹凸知覚特性の研究(「ハプティックインタラクション」特集)

抄録

Human can readily identify convex and concave geometry with his/her fingertip. Human characteristics of geometric perception have been studied in the field of Braille to optimize its readability. However, how accurate human can identify convex and concave geometry has not been studied very well. If such study would be performed, the result would give some insights on how the design parameters of a tactile display or sensor should be determined. Our experimental results revealed that signal detection performance and shape identification performance was almost the same for convex and concave geometry when the height (or depth) of the raised (or indented) area is over 0.2 mm. This method we used in the experiment can be applied in evaluating the performance of a developed robotic finger comparing with human shape identification performance in fingertip.