圧覚・滑り覚同時呈示形触覚ディスプレイ用二軸アクチュエータ

Abstract

According to the previous psychophysical experimental results, since human beings feel different sensations for pressure and shearing vibration applied to their finger surface, a new tactile display array consisting of multi-axial micro actuators is required to enhance degree of tactile virtual reality. In the present paper, we experimentally design serial and parallel typed two-axial micro actuators, which are utilized for the key part of the tactile display. The serial typed two-axial actuator comprises bimorph actuators connected in series. The parallel typed two-axial actuator is composed of two bimorph piezoelectric actuators and two small links connected by three joints. We formulate kinematics for the parallel typed two-axial actuator because the endpoint is controlled in the two-dimensional coordinate. We perform a series of experiments to evaluate these two-dimensional actuators. Although the serial typed actuator has different characteristics on x- and y-directional coordinates, it has an advantage on compactness. On the other hand, the parallel typed two-axial actuator has almost same characteristics on both x- and y- coordinates, and has wide strokes of about 1mm. Considering these characteristics depended upon actuator type, we will design the tactile display combined the serial and parallel typed two-axial actuator.