Proposal of a Tactile Display Method for Presenting Quality of Materials Based on the Temperature Change of Skin Surface while Touching the Materials

Abstract

Tactile information processing was studied based on psychophysical experiments in order to design a tactile display for “Hand with Sensory Feedback” of tele-existence robots or vitrual reality devices. Firstly, the identification characteristics of tactile sense concerned with the quality of materials were investigated when human fingertips touched the surface of various materials in a vertical direction. In addition to obtaining the tactile characteristics, the temperature change of the skin surface of a fingertip was measured when the fingertip contacted the surface of materials. From these experimental results, the temperature difference from the normal skin temperature was found to be very important to recognize what kind of materials contacted the skin surface. Next, the tactile display for presenting the quality of materials was designed on the basis of the above experimental results. The tactile display system was composed of a Peltier element and a PID controller. It was ascertained that the tactile display has the ability to easily present a similar quality of materials to reals objects.