A longstanding goal of haptic engineering is to develop haptic interfaces that can provide realistic sensations of touch. A fundamental step towards this goal is to understand what mechanical tactile signals the hand feels during daily touch interactions. This book reveals the complex patterns of mechanical waves propagating throughout the hand that can be elicited even by simple touch interactions, which helps in expanding existing knowledge of tactile function beyond the region of near skin-object contact and inspires new designs for haptic sensing and feedback technologies.
The first part of this book describes new methods for capturing dynamic, spatially distributed tactile signals in the whole hand during natural hand interactions. The second part characterizes these signals and evaluates how well and how efficiently they encode the information of touch, relating to the transmission of mechanical waves in hand tissues. The final part demonstrates how these findings can be utilized to create novel haptic effects and tactile displays.
Tactile Sensing, Information, and Feedback via Wave Propagation provides a unique view of tactile sensing and feedback and will appeal to researchers, engineers, and students who are interested in learning cutting-edge haptic science and technology.
Author(s): Yitian Shao
Series: Springer Series on Touch and Haptic Systems
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 147
City: Cham
Series Editors’ Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
1 Introduction
1.1 Motivation
1.2 Overview
1.3 Contributions
References
2 Background
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Human Haptics and the Hand
2.3 Skin Biomechanics
2.4 Haptic Feedback Technologies
2.4.1 Kinesthetic Feedback
2.4.2 Tactile Feedback
2.4.3 Explorable Haptic Feedback
References
3 Spatial Patterns of Whole-Hand Cutaneous Vibration During Active Touch
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Capturing Whole-Hand Tactile Signals
3.2.1 Apparatus
3.2.2 Measurement Procedure
3.2.3 Reconstructing Whole-Hand Signals from Sparse Measurement Locations
3.3 Spatial and Time Domain Analysis
3.3.1 Spatial Patterns of Whole-Hand Vibrations
3.3.2 Time Domain Correlates of Touch Interactions
3.4 Frequency Domain Analysis
3.5 Tactile Signals Encode the Modes of Interaction
3.5.1 Decoding Hand Interactions
3.5.2 Statistical Differences of Tactile Signals
3.6 Tactile Signals in Dorsal and Volar Hand Surfaces
3.7 Contact and Noncontact Elicited Vibrations
3.8 Discussion
References
4 Compression of Dynamic Tactile Information in the Human Hand
4.1 Introduction
4.2 A Data-Driven Model of Efficient Tactile Encoding
4.3 Spatial Encoding
4.4 Spatiotemporal Encoding
4.4.1 Mathematical Model and Optimization
4.4.2 Activation Weight Patterns
4.4.3 Hyperparameter Optimization of the Encoding Model
4.5 Encoding Efficiency
4.5.1 Classifying Manual Interactions from Tactile Codes
4.5.2 Evaluating the Sparseness of the Encoding
4.5.3 Encoding Robustness
4.6 Relevance to Tactile Sensation: Encoding Neural Population Responses via Spiking Simulations
4.7 Discussion
4.8 Conclusion
Appendix
References
5 A Wearable Tactile Sensor Array for Large Area Remote Vibration Sensing in the Hand
5.1 Introduction
5.1.1 Related Research
5.1.2 Contents and Contributions
5.2 Tactile Sensor Array Design
5.2.1 Overview of Electronics Design
5.2.2 Accelerometer Array
5.2.3 FPGA-Based Multi-channel Data Acquisition Board
5.2.4 Communication Protocol and Data Storage
5.3 Validation Experiments and Results
5.3.1 Sensor Array Performance
5.3.2 Wearable Sensing Experiments
5.3.3 Reconstructing Tactile Wave of Natural Stimuli
5.3.4 Measuring Both Sides of the Hand
5.4 Conclusion
References
6 Spatiotemporal Haptic Effects via Control of Cutaneous Wave Propagation
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Viscoelastic Waves in the Skin
6.3 In Vivo Vibrometry Experiments
6.4 Design of Spatiotemporal Haptic Effects
6.5 Perception of Spatiotemporal Haptic Effects
6.6 Conclusions
References
7 Conformable Distributed Haptic Feedback to Large Areas of the Skin
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Design and Operating Mechanism
7.2.1 Design for Reliability
7.2.2 Design for Safety
7.3 Fabrication
7.4 Control System
7.5 Validation Experiments
7.5.1 Mechanical Evaluation
7.5.2 User Study
7.6 Conclusion and Future Opportunities
References
8 Conclusion
8.1 Summary
8.2 Future Research Directions
References
