Full freedom-of-motion actuators as advanced haptic interfaces
Kyoungho Ha, Jae‐Young Yoo, Shupeng Li, Yuxuan Mao, S. Xu, Hongyuan Qi, Hanbing Wu, Chengye Fan, Hanyin Yuan, Jin‐Tae Kim, Matthew T. Flavin, Seonggwang Yoo, Pratyush Shahir, Sangjun Kim, Hak‐Young Ahn, J. Edward Colgate, Yonggang Huang, John A. Rogers
Abstract
The sense of touch conveys critical environmental information, facilitating object recognition, manipulation, and social interaction, and can be engineered through haptic actuators that stimulate cutaneous receptors. An unfulfilled challenge lies in haptic interface technologies that can engage all the various mechanoreceptors in a programmable, spatiotemporal fashion across large areas of the body. Here, we introduce a small-scale actuator technology that can impart omnidirectional, superimposable, dynamic forces to the surface of skin, as the basis for stimulating individual classes of mechanoreceptors or selected combinations of them. High-bit haptic information transfer and realistic virtual tactile sensations are possible, as illustrated through human subject perception studies in extended reality applications that include advanced hand navigation, realistic texture reproduction, and sensory substitution for music perception.