I-Corps: Tactile Displays for Haptic Gloves

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of technology that has the potential to increase accessibility for those with vision impairments both in augmented and virtual reality. Tactile graphics are considered to be critical for teaching spatially structured information like maps, geometry, and mathematical equations. However, dynamic tactile graphic displays today are often prohibitively expensive. The low cost and compactness of this technology could drastically change the availability of tactile graphic displays as well as refreshable Braille. Miniature hydraulic actuation is a foundational technology that has broad potential in other markets, such as soft robotics, wearable devices, prostheses, and other medical devices. This I-Corps project is based on the development of created miniature arrays of actuators which can produce the relevant pressures and deformations for haptic feedback. The individual actuators are electrically driven, individually addressable, compact, and dynamic. Additionally, the arrays are low cost, lightweight, and they scale favorably for large numbers of actuators. This effectively enables a new type of display that is capable of conveying detailed tactile “images” of shapes and edges across an area of skin. These innovations will be incorporated as tactile displays into haptic gloves to enable the sense of touch in augmented and virtual reality environments. The skin is a distributed sensory organ with over 250,000 tactile afferent fibers spread across the external surface of the body, and it is like the retina in its ability to sense across space. As the skin is stretched, compressed, and vibrated at different points, higher level objects are recognized, such as keys in your pocket. This type of nuanced, high volume tactile information transfer happens constantly and without effort in daily actions. An immense amount of knowledge can be contained in the sense of touch, such as the pattern of a surgeon’s suture, or the orientation and location of an object within a robot’s grip, yet it is hard to communicate. A dynamic tactile display allows this knowledge to be presented and is a fundamental piece of technology for the sense of touch, enabling additional research and commercial effort. While visual displays have reached the limits of the retina, the most complex haptic feedback that most people encounter is the buzz of a smartphone or click of a trackpad. This project will explore haptic gloves for robotic teleoperation tasks, and from simulation companies for emergency response training, and medical education. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.