A System of Tactile Transmission on the Fingertips with Electrical-Thermal and Vibration Stimulation.

This paper introduces a system of tactile transmission on the fingertips in which there are two sides: tactile-sender and a tactile-receiver. For the tactile-sender side, we developed a tactile sensor array and attached it inside a glove. This tactile sensor can simultaneously measure the temperature and the pressure distribution by measuring the resistance changes of pressure-sensitive conductive layer and chip thermistors while a user grasps or touches an object. The preliminary experiment showed that the system can measure at up to 2.7 kHz sampling rate, which is fast enough to capture the collision phenomenon. This sensor covers three fingers, each finger comprises 5 by 10 pressure sensing points and 8 temperature sensing points. For the tactile-receiver side, we developed a tactile module that consists of 4 by 5 electrode array, a Peltier and a heater film, and a high fidelity vibration actuator for simultaneously presenting electrical, thermal and vibration stimulation. Each module was attached inside the thumb, index and middle fingers of a glove. A system evaluation was conducted to observe the ability of our proposed algorithm for the communication between tactile sensor and tactile display.