CHS: Small: Understanding the Percept of Soft Objects for Designing Naturalistic Touch Displays

我们如何在手术过程中复制触摸“柔软”物体的感觉，比如李子（水果）、他人的手或组织？这是本项目研究的核心问题。我们如何感受物体的“顺应性”，即它的刚性或柔软性，是构建高保真触摸界面所需的重要信息。除了在娱乐和个人生产力方面的应用之外，这种接口还可以使外科医生区分胆囊和前列腺组织以及导管与脂肪和骨骼，小孩子可以感觉到父母的手，消费者可以检查和比较产品，衣服和工件。这个项目试图理解由指垫提供的触摸界面如何在空间和时间上变形，以充分传达自然的顺应感。对皮肤变形的适当控制将为触摸显示器的设计提供信息，使其感觉自然，机械效率高，可快速配置，反应灵敏。这个项目探索了手指垫表面的时间依赖线索与顺从或柔软感之间的联系。中心假设是时间依赖的线索，或在空间场中皮肤变形变化率的信息，控制着依从性的编码。有了这些信息，这个项目旨在用动态显示重现这些皮肤变形线索。为实现这些目标，计划了三个研究任务：(i)人类对自然物体（如水果和组织）的识别任务：在这里，基于墨水的程序将表征接触面积、力和位移关系。（ii）皮肤变形线索和数字运动学的生成：为此，工程的、弹性的刺激将复制自然的相互作用，同时消除每个刺激的可变性。新的人类受试者范例、成像设备和数据分析算法将被开发出来，以表征连续的皮肤变形和三维拉伸。时空线索的相对重要性将采用多维尺度分析。（iii）再现关键的柔软感知：将使用有限元分析设计一个柔软、透明、多腔的液压执行器，以产生动态的、实时的皮肤变形控制。总体而言，该项目寻求抽象的皮肤线索，这些线索是依从性感知的基础，类似于视觉，其中颜色在物理空间中是波长，而在心理空间中是色调，饱和度和亮度。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。

How can we replicate the sensation of touching a "soft" object such as a plum (fruit), or another's hand, or tissue during surgery? This is the central research question addressed in this project. How we feel an object's "compliance", that is, its rigidity or softness, is an important piece of information needed for building high fidelity touch interfaces. In addition to applications in entertainment and personal productivity, such interfaces could enable surgeons to distinguish gallbladder and prostate tissue and ducts from fat and bone, small children to feel a parent's hand, and consumers to inspect and compare products, clothing, and work pieces. This project seeks to understand how the touch interface provided by a finger pad must deform in space and time to adequately convey a natural sense of compliance. Proper control of the skin's deformation will inform the design of touch-enabled displays that feel natural and are mechanically efficient, rapidly configurable, and responsive. This project explores the connection between time-dependent cues at the finger pad surface and the percept of compliance, or softness. The central hypothesis is that time-dependent cues, or information in the rate of change of skin deformation over a spatial field, govern the encoding of compliance. With that information, this project aims to reproduce these skin deformation cues with a dynamic display. Three research tasks are planned for achieving these objectives: (i) Human discrimination tasks with natural objects such as fruits and tissues: here, an ink-based procedure will characterize contact area, force, and displacement relationships. (ii) Generation of skin deformation cues and digit kinematics: for this, engineered, elastic stimuli will replicate natural interactions yet remove per stimulus variability. Novel human subjects paradigms, imaging equipment, and data analysis algorithms will be developed to characterize continuous skin deformation and stretch in 3D. The relative importance of spatiotemporal cues will be analyzed using multi-dimensional scaling. (iii) Reproducing key softness percepts: A soft, transparent, multi-chamber hydraulic actuator will be designed using finite element analysis to produce dynamic, on-the-fly control of skin deformation. Overall, this project seeks to abstract cutaneous cues that underlie the percept of compliance, akin to vision, where color is wavelength in physics space but hue, saturation, and brightness in psychological space.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.