Abstract
Wearable haptic displays can provide haptic information while allowing for free body movement. Among these haptic displays, pneumatic haptic displays have the advantages of flexibility and lightweight; however, they require bulky air tubes and a heavy air compressor. To solve this problem, we propose a wearable haptic display that uses a liquid-to-gas phase change actuator and a Peltier device as a way to reduce the size of the entire system. A low-boiling-point liquid is encapsulated in the flexible bladder of the actuator, and the vaporization of the liquid, which induces the inflation of the actuator, is controlled by the external Peltier device. In this study, we implemented a pressure sensor to monitor pressure inside the liquid-to-gas phase change actuator. The pressure measurement will contribute to controlling the generated normal force. First, we characterized the pressure response concerning the design of the liquid-to-gas phase change actuator. Next, we evaluated the output normal force of the haptic display and confirmed that the maximum output force reached a few newtons, which is a similar level to the off-the-shelf wearable haptic display devices. Finally, a sensory evaluation revealed that the experimental participants perceived the haptic stimulus to their fingertips provided by the proposed haptic display in a few seconds. According to the obtained results, the proposed haptic display can be applied to applications such as human interfaces to provide force, allowing for a response time of a few seconds.
Highlights
Haptic and tactile technologies have attracted the interest of both scientific research and the electronics industry; in addition, these technologies have seen advances in presenting information to the five senses
OVERVIEW We developed a wearable haptic display comprised of a liquid-to-gas phase change actuator with a Peltier device and controlled it with feedback from the sensing data from a pressure sensor integrated inside the actuator’s pouch
Previous work [19], [20], [24] in which an actuator of approximately the same size was driven by natural cooling, we found that our haptic display was shorter
Summary
Haptic and tactile technologies have attracted the interest of both scientific research and the electronics industry; in addition, these technologies have seen advances in presenting information to the five senses. According to their use cases, various haptic displays have been proposed and are applied to provide haptic information to various parts of the human body. The wearable-type haptic displays can especially provide haptic information without restricting significant body movement, including hand movement Because of this advantage, these haptic displays have been applied to force presentation in virtual reality environments or remote operations [4]–[6]
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