Tactile Sensing and Display for Texture

Preamble: A reasonable starting point is to look at the psychophysics literature on "What is texture?" That is, how do we perceive and interpret "texture"? Klatzky and Lederman and others have addressed this topic. The perception of texture involves a combination of stimuli from, primarily, fast-acting mechanoreceptors. Human subjects can draw distinctions among textures using only vibrational information, but in general also use mechanoreceptors with small receptive fields.

• S. Lederman publications page
• S. Lederman et al., Integrating Multimodal Information about Surface Texture via a Probe: Relative Contributions of Haptic and Touch-Produced Sound Sources 10th Symp. On Haptic Interfaces For Virtual Envir. & Teleoperator Systs. (HAPTICSí02)

Texture Display

Skin stretch might be useful for displaying textures. Main developments are from the lab of Prof. Vince Hayward at McGill University, Montreal.

• Page by Jerome Pasquero at McGill on Stimulation of the Fingertip by Lateral Skin Stretch -- summary of technology and links to several papers.
• Pasquero, J. and Hayward, V., STReSS: A Practical Tactile Display System with One Millimeter Spatial Resolution and 700 Hz Refresh Rate, Eurohaptics 2003 -- design of the skin stretch display.
• Levesque, V. and Hayward, V. Experimental Evidence of Lateral Skin Strain During Tactile Exploration, Eurohaptics 2003 -- useful techniques for measurement of finger pad shear deformation.

A vibrating piezoelectric texture display, which may work at least in part due to skin stretch, is presented by Ikei et al. 2001 (ICRA?).

Electrotactile displays have intriguing mechanical simplicity and offer the possibility of high spatial resolution. By varying the amplitude and waveform of the electrical stimulation, different degrees of apparent "roughness" can be effected. However, it remains difficult to create convincing sensations of textured surfaces, without artifacts of the electrical stimulation such as "tingling" sensations.

• Kajimoto et al., U. Tokyo. Describe an electrocutaneous display with some ability to independently stimulate different mechanoreceptors so that a variety of sensations may be induced. This should lead to more realistic sensations.
  • Related projects from the U Tokyo STAR lab:
    Smart Tool, Smart Touch - electrotactile display,.
• K.A. Kaczmarek (U. Wisc.) has a number of projects on electrotactile display.
  • IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng. 1991 Interesting multi-channel, multiwaveform display, with circuit details.
  • IEEE Trans. Neural Sys. Rehab. Eng. 2003 Pattern identification as a function of applied currents.
  • related work -- as a function of waveform
• Poletto and Van Doren (1999) show a fairly simple circuit for electrotactile stimulation.
• See also Yarimaga et al. ICCAS2005 for a relatively simple design.

Texture Sensing

See also related work under SlippageDetection.

Stress rate sensing employs strips of piezoelectric polymer (e.g. PVDF) embedded in a textured rubber skin. The strips produce a charge in proportion to their strain and the entire sensor produces a current proportional to the local derivative of stress.

• R. D. Howe and M. R. Cutkosky, "Dynamic tactile sensing: Perception of fine surface features with stress rate sensing," IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation 9(2):140-151, April 1993. -- This is the original stress rate sensor paper.
• J. Son, E. A. Monteverde, and R. D. Howe, "A tactile sensor for localizing transient events in manipulation," Proceedings of the 1994 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, San Diego, CA, May 1994, pp. 471-476. -- Probably the best of the stress rate sensor designs.
• J. S. Son, M. R. Cutkosky, and R. D. Howe, "Comparison of contact sensor localization abilities during manipulation," Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 17(4):217-233, June 1996. Also presented at IROS '95: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Pittsburgh, PA, August 5-9, 1995, Proceedings vol. 2, p. 96-101.

Skin Acceleration sensing - employs miniature accelerometers that cling to the underside of a compliant, textured artificial skin -- useful for detecting small surface features.

• Howe, H.D., and Cutkosky, M.R. "Sensing skin acceleration for slip and texture perception," Proceedings of the 1989 IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation, Scottsdale, AZ, May 14-16, 1989
• M.R. Cutkosky and J.M. Hyde, Manipulation Control with Dynamic Tactile Sensing, 6th ISRR, Oct. 2-5 1993.

Texture Classification and Sensing,

• S.H. Kim, et al.Texture classification using a polymer-based MEMS tactile sensor J. Micromech. Microeng. 15 (2005) 912–920.
• piezo electric fabric in glove

Commercial displays and sensors

• Pressure Profile Systems Inc. -- Jae Son's company specializing in precise pressure sensors for biomedical applications.
• A source of piezo films and sensors -- there are also many vendors of "hobbyist" packs of piezo films.
  • Manual from MSI on piezo film.
• tutorial of piezo film properties