Fingertip haptic texture device

Abstract

Tactile internet promises to enable humans to manipulate remote physical environments. The human interacts with the remote environment by manipulating a haptic device. Recently, research effort into tactile internet and haptic devices has seen a significant increase. However replicating one aspect of executing an action, feeling textures, is still in its infancy. Current devices that can portray texture are severely limited, which also interferes with the ability to research the topic. In this thesis, we propose a novel device that can realistically portray textures to the fingertip, and respond to displacement in real-time. We call this a Haptic Texture Device (HTD). The design features custom actuators, with low latency < 0.6ms and at least 50mN per mm2 of pushing force. The actuators are placed in a grid with a 2.0mmpitch at the fingertip. TheHaptic TextureDevice (HTD) can be moved over a 2D surface. Movement of the HTD results in real-time updates to the portrayed texture to reflect the displacement. The end-to-end delay between displacement and update of the texture was measured to be 17 ms. However, we demonstrated that the theoretical limit of the end-to-end delay could bewell below1 ms, by making use of higher quality displacement sensor. Readily available heightmaps are used as a source of texture data. Because a method for characterizing the performance hitherto did not exist, a novel benchmark was developed that incorporates realistic textures and human participants. The results of our benchmarking yielded an average score of 61%. Since the device is the first of its kind, it cannot be compared to similar devices yet, but it can be used as a starting point on which future HTDs can improve.