Influence of scanning velocity on skin vibration for coarse texture

Abstract

Tactile information can be obtained from the skin vibration elicited by the mechanical interaction between human fingertip and an object. Here, the skin vibration can be changed depending on exploratory movements. We herein investigated the influence of scanning velocity on the skin vibration for coarse textures. We used non-periodic coarse textures and measured the skin vibration under three different velocities. The results showed that the intensity of skin vibration is not significantly influenced by the velocity. However, the median frequency of the power spectrum significantly increased with the increase in velocity, whereas it did not have a proportional relation to the velocity and the particle size as on periodic textures. In addition, the median frequency had a tendency of slightly decreasing as the particle size became larger. A possible reason was discussed based on both the frequency response of the human fingertip and the object pattern.