[D92] ThimbleSense: A new wearable tactile device for human and robotic fingers

Summary form only given. In this demo we present a wearable device that enables to simultaneously collect information about the position of contacts and the magnitude and direction of contact forces applied by a hand to a grasped object. Such a device consists of a thimble that can be easily positioned on both human and robotic fingertips: it is endowed with a 6 axis force/torque sensor, while its absolute position and orientation can be recovered via a marker-based motion capture system, without needing for any assumption on the hand kinematics. This device can be profitably used for studying human and robotic hand behaviour in grasping tasks and haptic exploration.