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Haptic devices typically rely on rigid actuators and bulky power supply systems, limiting wearability. Soft materials improve comfort, but careful distribution of stiffness is required to ground actuation forces and enable load transfer to the skin. We present Haptiknit, an approach in which soft, wearable, knit textiles with embedded pneumatic actuators enable programmable haptic display. By integrating pneumatic actuators within high- and low-stiffness machine-knit layers, each actuator can transmit 40 newtons in force with a bandwidth of 14.5 hertz. We demonstrate the concept with an adjustable sleeve for the forearm coupled to an untethered pneumatic control system that conveys a diverse array of social touch signals. We assessed the sleeve’s performance for discriminative and affective touch in a three-part user study and compared our results with those of prior electromagnetically actuated approaches. Haptiknit improves touch localization compared with vibrotactile stimulation and communicates social touch cues with fewer actuators than pneumatic textiles that do not invoke distributed stiffness. The Haptiknit sleeve resulted in similar recognition of social touch gestures compared to a voice-coil array but represented a more portable and comfortable form factor.
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HaPPArray: Haptic Pneumatic Pouch Array for Feedback in Hand-Held Robots
Haptic feedback can provide operators of hand- held robots with active guidance during challenging tasks and with critical information on environment interactions. Yet for such haptic feedback to be effective, it must be lightweight, capable of integration into a hand-held form factor, and capable of displaying easily discernible cues. We present the design and evaluation of HaPPArray — a haptic pneumatic pouch array — where the pneumatic pouches can be actuated alone or in sequence to provide information to the user. A 3x3 array of pouches was integrated into a handle, representative of an interface for a hand-held robot. When actuated individually, users were able to correctly identify the pouch being actuated with 86% accuracy, and when actuated in sequence, users were able to correctly identify the associated direction cue with 89% accuracy. These results, along with a demonstration of how the direction cues can be used for haptic guidance of a medical robot, suggest that HaPPArray can be an effective approach for providing haptic feedback for hand-held robots.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2146095
- PAR ID:
- 10402470
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
- ISSN:
- 1049-3492
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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