A Study on Haptic Interfaces

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In this project, we obtained some basic results on tactile feeling interfaces. The aim of the research was realizing a system to transmit tactile feeling from an artificial sensor to a human skin with high fidelity. Toward this goal, we studied new basic physical effects for haptic devices, sensors that can sense tactile feeling like human skin, new mechanisms of tactile display, and information processing in human skins. The results are summarized as follows.1) New principle of an ultrasound emitterA new principle of an ultrasonic emitter was studied. Intense ultrasound generates radiation pressure on the skin suitable for tactile display because it can be accurately controlled with high spatial resolution and temporal response. A thertnally-induced-ultrasound emitter studied here is suitable to generate such intense sound. We showed the basic principle of sound generation and methods to heighten the intensity, and we finally obtained intense ultrasound more than 1 kPa.2) Tactile disp … More lay and informational studies on human tactile sensationTactile resolution of the human skin was clarified. We proposed a hypothesis on determination of human tactile feeling. Since there were paradoxical properties in human tactile perception that a human skin has relatively large two-point-discrimination-threshold while it can distinguish very fine feature of the object surface, the tactile resolution for realistic tactile display had been a mystery. Our hypothesis explains this and was proved by experiments.3) Tactile sensorFor realizing an elastic sensor skin with faithful properties to a human skin suggested by above results, we proposed a wire-free tactile sensing chip based on optical connection. Each sensing chip with an individual 10 detects 6 components of stress tensor and sends the digital signal with emitted light from the chip. Since the sensing chips need no wire, they can be located three-dimensionally in a sensor skin with high density without loosing the skin's elasticity. The sensing chip including VLSI chip was designed. Less