Tactile design of manipulator fingers based on fingertip/textile friction-induced vibration stimulations

Abstract

Textile-like soft and flexible products are widely used in our daily life. Understanding the relationship between the tactile sensations of textiles and the tactile stimuli is essential for developing humanoid robot's finger haptic system, especially for certain kind of robot systems such as service robots and exploratory robots. This paper built a frequency space that can qualitatively represent a roughness sensation of textiles by a developing independently random match algorithm in combination with neurophysiological features of cutaneous mechanoreceptors. The experimental results show that the sum of amplitude in frequency range between 18 and 118 Hz can effectively describe the roughness sensory of textile with accuracies of 98.5%. In other words, by applying the sum of amplitude in frequency range between 18 and 118 Hz could successfully match roughness sensation of textiles, and it will help engineer of humanoid robot design manipulator finger haptic system in textile field.