Foto 7

M. Bianchi, E. Battaglia, M. Poggiani, S. Ciotti, A. Bicchi: “ A Wearable Fabric-based display for haptic multi-cue delivery “, 2016 IEEE Haptics Symposium (HAPTICS), April 2016, Best Paper Award

Written by

Softness represents one of the most informative haptic properties, which plays a fundamental role in both everyday tasks and more complex procedures. Thus, it is not surprising that a lot of effort has been devoted to designing haptic systems able to suitably reproduce this information. At the same time, wearability has gained an increasing importance as a novel paradigm to enable a more effective and naturalistic human robot interaction. Capitalizing upon our previous studies on grounded softness devices, in this paper we present the Wearable Fabric Yielding Display (W-FYD), a fabric-based tactile display for multi-cue delivery that can be worn by user’s finger. W-FYD enables to implement both passive and active tactile exploration. Different levels of stiffness can be reproduced by modulating the stretching state of a fabric through two DC motors. An additional vertical degree of freedom is implemented through a lifting mechanism, which enables to convey softness stimuli to the user finger pad. Furthermore, a sliding effect on the finger can be also induced. Experiments with humans show the effectiveness of W-FYD for haptic multi-cue delivery.