A Novel 3RRS Wearable Fingertip Cutaneous Device for Virtual Interaction

Wearable haptic devices are recently gaining great popularity among researchers. Such interfaces will indeed enable natural forms of communication between the wearer and the environment. Humans will be free to move and interact with the surrounding world while being provided with rich and unobtrusive haptic information. In this respect, fingertip cutaneous technologies have shown promising results. Prattichizzo et al. [5] presented a wearable cable-driven 3-degrees-of-freedom (3DoF) cutaneous device for the fingertip. It consists of two parts: one is located on the back of the fingertip, supporting three DC motors, and the other one is placed in contact with the volar surface of the fingertip. The two parts are connected by three cables, actuated by the motors. The mobile platform can press into the user’s fingertip and re-angle to simulate contacts with slanted surfaces. Three force sensors placed on the platform measure the contact force at the fingertip. The maximum force applicable is 1.5 N and the device weights as little as 30 g. More recently, Tsetserukou et al. [7] presented a 2-DoF wearable fingertip display composed of a five-bar linkage system. Two DC motors, placed on the back of the finger, actuate the linkage mechanism. When the two motors spin in the same direction, the linkage system applies shear stimuli at the finger pulp; when the two motors spin in different directions, the linkage system applies normal stimuli at the finger pulp.