A sensory substitution technique is presented in which the kinesthetic and tactile feedback are substituted by tactile feedback only provided by two wearable devices able to apply forces to the index finger and thumb holding a handle during a needle insertion task. The force pattern fed back to the user while using the tactile device is similar, in terms of intensity and area of application, to...

Past work in robotic grasping often relied purely on vision; However, human grasping heavily rely also on touch. While vision provides coarse-grained information about object location, shape, and size, touch provides complementary fine-grained cues about contact forces, textures, local shape around contact points, and deformability, all of which are critical for evaluating an ongoing grasp. In ...

Robotic devices – limited to the structured environment of manufacturing plants until few years ago – are slowly making way into human life, which has led to the emergence of interaction and learning issues in robots. Such issues are important for future robot to be able to learn autonomously and to interact safely with the environment i.e. without causing any harm to it or to the objects with ...

This paper presents the development of a low-cost MEMS based biomimetic tactile device intended to be incorporated as the core element in a biomimetic fingerpad. The developed silicon based sensing devices consist of an array of capacitive sensors with optimized design to measure force ranges encountered during tactile exploration of surfaces with different textures. As with the biological fing...

Recent studies have confirmed and extended the 19th-century observations of E. H. Weber that concomitant cold can intensify the apparent heaviness of tactile pressure stimulation. These studies have also shown that concomitant wann can also intensify pressure sensation in some regions of the body. The question arises whether pressure can intensify thermal sensations under comparable conditions ...

An electrocutaneous display system composed of three layers is implemented for augmentation of skin sensation. The first layer has electrodes on the front side of a thin plate, the second has optical sensors on the reverse side of the plate, and the third is a thin film force sensor between the other two layers. Visual images captured by the sensor are translated into tactile information, and d...

In this work, we present a new method for doing object recognition using tactile force sensors that makes use of recent work on “tactile appearance” to describe objects by the spatially-varying appearance characteristics of their surface texture. The method poses recognition as a localization problem with a discrete component of the state representing object identity, allowing the application o...