Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) tactile display based on properties of mechanoreceptors

The authors first analyze dynamic properties of rapidly adapting mechanoreceptors in order to derive a principle of tactile displays. It is shown that Meissner corpuscles with coiled axons and Pacinian corpuscles with layered lamellae are suited to detect equivoluminal distortion of skin. Combining these analyses with a model of a contact and a relative motion between an object and the skin, it is shown that a prerequisite for tactile displays is to generate sources of shear stress that can be spatially dispersed at the skin surface and temporally modulated with a stick-slip frequency determined by parameters of the object to be displayed. As a device that satisfies this prerequisite, we propose a tactile display using Surface Acoustic Waves (SAW). The roughness of the surface can be changed continuously by controlling the burst frequency of the SAW.