Interactive surfaces form an integral component of intelligent environments. In the paper, we describe HapticArmrest, a simple tactile interface that communicates tactual surface characteristic and form of interactive elements on direct touch surfaces. Spatially separating manual touch input and active tactile output allows for the combination of various types of tactile actuators for versatile...

Tactile maps are non-visual substitutes for visual maps for blind and visually impaired people. In [3, 11] we suggested to increase the effectiveness of tactile maps by developing a system that generates assisting utterances to facilitate knowledge acquisition. The utterances are inspired by a corpus of assisting utterances given to tactile map explorers by human assistants. The tactile maps ar...

A tactile system to support severe visually-impaired or blind people in the world for their orientation and navigation had been developed. To optimize the design, some parameters of tactile display device were evaluated. In the present paper, we focused on the reaction time to tactile stimuli. In the test, the stimuli were produced through a vibration belt that was worn around the participants’...

This paper describes a comprehensive tactile sensor systemwhich can cover wide areas of full-body robots. Based on design criteria which are introduced from requirements, we develop two types of tactile sensor elements. One is a multi-valued touch sensor which has multi-level pressure thresholds. It is capable of coveringwide areas of robot surfaces. The other is made of soft, conductive gel, w...

The present study presents a new rendering algorithm for a moving tactile stroke on the palm of the hand placed on a sparse 2D tactor array. Our algorithm utilizes the relation between signal duration and signal onset asynchrony previously proposed for “tactile brush” [1], but extends it by applying 3-actuator phantom sensations and adjusting the sampling rate. We compare our proposed algorithm...

Demonstration learning is a powerful and practical technique to develop robot behaviors. Even so, development remains a challenge and possible demonstration limitations, for example correspondence issues between the robot and demonstrator, can degrade policy performance. This work presents an approach for policy improvement through a tactile interface located on the body of the robot. We introd...

In tactile learning, sucrose is the unconditioned stimulus and reward, which is usually applied to the antenna to elicit proboscis extension and which the bee can drink when it is subsequently applied to the extended proboscis. The conditioned stimulus is a tactile object that the bee can scan with its antennae. In this paper we describe the quantitative relationships between gustatory antennal...

Tactile sensors capable of sensing normal and shearing force produced on a robotic finger and an object are useful for fitting a dextrose hand that can be applied to tasks that require human-like handling. Examples include such manufacturing tasks as assembly, disassembly, inspection, and materials handing. Especially in the case of humanoid robots, grasping slippery or flexible objects is requ...

Ideally, a tactile stimulator presents information through control of surface normal stress and surface shear stresses. Psy-chophysical experiments measured the eeect of shear stress information on the perception of static stimuli applied normal to the surface. Wax gratings in two diierent orientations and various spatial frequencies were used as stimuli. Elastic layers, representing the anti-a...

CONTEXT Therapeutic Touch (TT) is a widely used nursing practice rooted in mysticism but alleged to have a scientific basis. Practitioners of TT claim to treat many medical conditions by using their hands to manipulate a "human energy field" perceptible above the patient's skin. OBJECTIVE To investigate whether TT practitioners can actually perceive a "human energy field." DESIGN Twenty-one...