Frequency Modulation Based Vibrotactile Device for Teleoperation

This study investigated how people achieve pointing and path following tasks using a vibrotactile device. In pointing tasks, subjects are asked to reach a target as fast as possible guided by two types of tactile information generated by a specific glove we developed. The first type of information is a constant vibrating stimulation and the second one is a frequency modulation based vibration. A comparison using the visual channel when performing the same task is done is presented. For each modality, two experiments were performed. The first one is 1D: the subjects reach a target situated on a line. The second one is 2D and the target is in the horizontal plane. The results we obtained showed that tactile based pointing tasks obey to the classical Fitts´ law. Furthermore, we show that the frequency modulation based vibration mode is more useful than the constant one for pointing tasks. In path following experiments, we have a comparison between global and local visual feedback. Results show that in case of lacking global spatial information, vibrotactile feedback can give similar performance as visual feedback.