| Research Abstract |
In the study, we propose a novel tactile perception sensation display called tactile mirror, aiming at attaining, high fidelity in transmitting the perception information to humans. It has mechanisms of both monitoring the information that is displayed on human finger palms and feeding it back to tactile display controllers. First, we designed artificial finger skin with ridges supposing a pinch-lift motion of an object by a, human thumb and a pointing finger, and then designed a static friction sensor and a display separately. Furthermore, we developed both an artificial Meisner and Pacinian corpuscles each of which has the same frequency characteristic of that of the corresponding human corpuscle. Through these processes, we successfully enhanced the S/N ratio of detection circuits in multi-stage amplifiers.
We incorporated the artificial corpuscles into our experimental setup which was mainly composed of a X-Y-θ stage. Then, we established a method for detecting incipient slip generated at the contact surface between finger skin and a human finger, and preventing gross slip by controlling the stage with incipient slip information. Usefulness of the tactile mirror was verified through the experiment where this method realized detection of initial human fingers motion 90 ms earlier than a conventional control method using contact force information. Similarly, we demonstrated another aspect of usefulness of the tactile perception information in comparison with a conventional tactile display without any feedback mechanism. To meet the future demand for mounting our development on such haptic devices as our proposal of SkilMates, we finally manufactured an extremely small-sized tactile display with a tactile mirror that allowed 3-axis linear motion of the finger skin that was in contact with a human finger.
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