Compensation of perceived hardness of a virtual object with cutaneous feedback

Abstract

Wearable glove type haptic interfaces are often required to be light weight, which constrains the actuator to exert low torques. This causes a virtual object to feel compliant, reducing the range of presented surface properties. To overcome the limitation, we propose to compensate the hardness of a virtual object with cutaneous feedback. A cutaneous haptic interface is designed to present the hardness to a user’s fingertip along with a force-feedback interface and the corresponding rendering strategy is proposed. Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed approach for one-finger touch and two-finger grip for stiffness values under 0.3 N/mm. Experimental results indicate that the addition of cutaneous feedback led the virtual surface to feel significantly harder than the nominal stiffness felt by force-feedback alone. In addition, the perceived hardness was significantly affected by the rate of hardness rendered with cutaneous interface when the nominal stiffness was increased.