CHS: Small: Collaborative Research: Wearable Fingertip Haptic Devices for Virtual and Augmented Reality: Design, Control, and Predictive Tracking

在现实世界中，人们严重依赖触觉（力和触觉）反馈来操纵和探索物体。然而，在虚拟和增强现实环境中，触觉必须人工产生。需要在传感和反馈方面取得进展，为人类互动、教育和培训创造更现实的虚拟场景。该研究将实现可穿戴指尖触觉反馈系统，增强人类在虚拟和增强现实中的感知和任务表现，并将为计算机介导的触觉领域提供重要的新设计和渲染见解，为有前途的可穿戴触觉设备形式提供帮助。指尖触觉设备的成功开发和跟踪方法的改进将降低触觉技术与虚拟现实相结合的成本，并产生更加逼真和引人注目的虚拟体验。利用先进技术的虚拟现实有效触觉反馈系统将通过无数的应用，如外科手术和爆炸物拆除等关键任务的培训，触觉通信以实现设计和电子商务，以及沉浸在虚拟世界中以增强教育和培训，从而改善人类健康和福祉，从而产生广泛的影响。项目成果将通过教育应用演示、扩展触觉在线课程以及公开软件和数据来传播。外展计划、公共实验室参观以及女性和少数族裔研究生、本科生和高中生的指导将扩大工程领域未被充分代表的群体的参与。这个项目有三个主要的技术组成部分。首先，将开发测量力相互作用的仪器对象，并将该数据与手指姿势的外部测量相结合。其次，新的可穿戴触觉设备将被开发出来，该设备将使用局部动觉反馈和皮肤变形的组合，以最小的负担提供真实的触觉反馈。模块化的触觉设备设计将有助于各种设计选择的快速测试。然后从控制策略、自由度、皮肤接触条件和手指接地等方面对基本设计进行优化，以最佳地匹配之前收集的真实抓取和操作数据。第三，基于在现实世界抓取和操作数据中观察到的特征行为，将开发预测跟踪算法。所有的触觉设备和跟踪方法都将在虚拟和增强现实环境中进行评估。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

In the real world, people rely heavily on haptic (force and tactile) feedback to manipulate and explore objects. However, in virtual and augmented reality environments, haptic sensations must be artificially generated. Advances in both sensing and feedback are needed to create more realistic virtual scenarios for human interaction, education, and training. This research will implement wearable fingertip haptic feedback systems that enhance human perception and task performance in virtual and augmented reality, and will provide the field of computer-mediated haptics with important new design and rendering insights for a promising form of wearable haptic device. Successful development of fingertip haptic devices and improved tracking methods will lower the cost of integrating haptic technology into virtual reality, and yield more realistic and compelling virtual experiences. Effective haptic feedback systems for virtual reality utilizing the developed technologies will have broad impact by improving human health and well-being through a myriad of applications such as training for critical tasks like surgery and defusing of explosive ordnance, tactile communication to enable design and e-commerce, and immersion in virtual worlds for enhanced education and training. Project outcomes will be disseminated through demonstrations of educational applications, expansion of an online course on haptics, and publicly available software and data. Outreach programs, public lab tours, and mentoring of female and minority graduate students, undergraduates, and high school students will broaden participation of underrepresented groups in engineering.This project has three main technical components. First, instrumented objects will be developed that measure force interactions and integrate that data with external measurements of finger pose. Second, new wearable haptic devices will be developed that use a combination of local kinesthetic feedback and skin deformation to provide realistic haptic feedback with minimal encumbrance. Modular haptic device designs will facilitate rapid testing of various design choices. Then the basic design will be optimized in terms of control strategy, degrees of freedom, skin contact conditions, and finger grounding to best match the real-world grasping and manipulation data collected earlier. Third, predictive tracking algorithms will be developed for grasping based on characteristic behaviors observed in real-world grasping and manipulation data. All of the haptic devices and tracking methods will be evaluated both in virtual and in augmented reality environments.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.