MEAM Seminar: “Delivering Expressive and Personalized Fingertip Haptic Cues”

The importance of meaningful tactile experiences has become increasingly apparent in areas such as teleoperation, education, and gaming. As the applications of rendering haptic stimuli are growing, so are the requirements of haptic interfaces, in that the intended audience is becoming more diverse and the intended interactions are becoming more complicated. For the past few decades there has been a consistent effort to improve the range and realism of haptic cues, yet typical haptic rendering continues to be one-size-fits-all and low-dimensional. To render increasingly realistic haptic cues, we must focus on both expressiveness and personalization.

In this talk I will present work towards delivering more expressive and personalized fingertip haptic cues from the perspective of both mechanical design and rendering approach. I will first present the Fuppeteer, a parallel continuum manipulator that can move a flat surface around the fingertip with six degrees of freedom. This wearable device can provide combinations of normal and shear forces across the user’s entire fingertip, regardless of finger shape and size. We have evaluated system performance through force measurements and through a human-subject study. This talk will also feature ongoing development of algorithms for delivering personalized sensed cues, independent of the specific haptic device and remote sensor used. I will discuss both geometric and data-driven approaches, and I will provide preliminary measurements of the rendering error generated by each method.