New Test Structure for Tactile Display using Laterally Driven Tactors

This paper presents a new concept of tactile display based on lateral motion of the contact pins (tactors) and its preliminary evaluation on tactile rendering. Unlike traditional tactile devices where tactors are arranged in an array and move upwards/downwards, a single row of tactors moves laterally on a rail to display tactile information as in a 2D matrix. The advantage of this concept is that a row of N actuators can display some information that has been traditionally done with a matrix of N x N, thus, reducing significantly the number of actuators, simplifying their electronic drive and allowing the development of low-cost, lightweight, compact and highly-portable tactile displays. Actuation approach, tactile display design and prototype as well as perceptual results are presented and discussed.