Touch It, Rub It, Feel It! Haptic Rendering of Physical Textures with a Low Cost Wearable System

Abstract

Information about the texture of an object’s surface is crucial for its recognition and robust manipulation. During robotic teleoperation or interaction with a Virtual Reality, is important to feedback such information to the human user. However, most available solutions for haptic feedback are expensive and/or cumbersome. In this paper we propose a low cost and wearable system that allows users to feel the texture of physical objects by virtually rubbing them. Our main contributions are: i) a system for encoding a virtual representation of the texture of physical materials; ii) a system to haptically render such virtual representation on the user fingertips; iii) an experimental validation of the combined system in a object recognition task. We show that users can successfully recognize physical objects with different textures by virtually rubbing their surfaces using the proposed system.