We propose a tentative tactile perception model called Simple Bundle Model and examine it by a tactile display based on ultrasonic radiation pressure. The ultrasonic tactile display reproduces high-resolution stress patterns with wide bandwidth on the skin. It is a multipurpose device for synthesizing high-fidelity tactile feeling, and useful to clarify the human tactile perception. The prototy...

This paper presents development of new haptic display capable of stimulating the muscles and tendons of the forearms as well as the tactile receptors in the fingers as a new approach for virtual reality device. Investigation of simultaneous presentation of both tactile and force effects are conducted and presented in this paper. The haptic display consists of a tactile display with a 4-by-12 ar...

This paper describes precision enhancement of an optical three-axis tactile sensor capable of detecting both normal force and tangential force. The sensor’s single cell consists of a columnar feeler and 2-by-2 conical feelers. We have derived equations to precisely estimate the three-axis force from the area-sum and area-difference of the conical feelers’ contact areas by taking into account wr...

Grasping and manipulation of objects, as well as the capability interacting safely with the environment (possibly including also humans), is a fundamental task for a humanoid robot. In order to tackle these issues a great effort has been put for over two decades to develop robot hands or mechanisms emulating the grasping capabilities of a human hand (Salisbury & Mason 1985; Jacobsen et al. 1986...

Tactile roughness magnitude estimates increase with contact force. However, it is not known whether discrimination thresholds are affected by contact force and other parameters, such as duration and tangential movement. The effects of these factors on roughness discrimination thresholds were determined using an adaptive staircase procedure for coarse and fine texture discrimination during activ...

We discuss here about the realization of tactile sensor based on the principle of change in piezoelectric resonance frequency with the applied pressure. An array of electrodes has been adopted on either side of the PZT material to have independent resonators. The common areas sandwiched between the electrodes and excitable at resonance frequency of the PZT material are used to form the sensitiv...

We present a novel tactile sensor, which is applied for dextrous grasping with a simple robot gripper. The hardware novelty consists of an array of capacitive sensors, which couple to the object by means of little brushes of fibers. These sensor elements are very sensitive (with a threshold of about 5 mN) but robust enough not to be damaged during grasping. They yield two types of dynamical tac...

This paper focuses on a method of estimating contact force dynamically between environment and an object, which is grasped by the soft planar fingers with tactile sensors. The external contact force acting on the grasped object causes the tactile sensors to generate the displacement distributions and the force distributions. We present a method of dynamic tactual image acquisitions for both dis...

Tactile sensors capable of sensing normal and shearing force produced on a robotic finger and an object are useful for fitting a dextrose hand that can be applied to tasks that require human-like handling. Examples include such manufacturing tasks as assembly, disassembly, inspection, and materials handing. Especially in the case of humanoid robots, grasping slippery or flexible objects is requ...

A novel 4 by 4 array of electromagnetic micro-actuators operating on the principle of voice-coil actuators is presented. The intended application of the array is dynamic tactile stimulation, where multiple actuators generate an illusion of touching a moving pattern. In comparison to earlier designs [1-3], the device has smaller dimensions of 2.28 mm in diameter and 7 mm in length, which allowed...