Discrimination and Remembrance Experiments Research on Softness Haptic Perception

Many applications in virtual reality and telerobot call for the implementation of displaying to the human softness haptic on the object being touched. Although there are lots of literatures on discrimination thresholds for displacement, force magnitude, shape, and viscosity, there is still a lack of research on discrimination and remembrance of softness perception of human fingertip. In this paper, a novel stiffness display device based on deformable length of elastic element control is presented firstly. Then the experiments of human fingertip perception of softness haptic by using the device that we developed are carried out. The haptic perception of human finger which includes resolution, times, frequency and remembrance are discussed. At last, some important conclusions are drawn. The results can aid in the process of designing haptic devices.