Publications related to Haptic technology

SORI: A softness-rendering interface to unravel the nature of softness perception

Jamie Paik, Mustafa Mete, Hwayeong Jeong

Tactile perception of softness serves a critical role in the survival, well-being, and social interaction among various species, including humans. This perception informs activities from food selection in animals to medical palpation for disease detection ...

National Academy of Sciences2024

Additively manufactured stretchable zipping electrostatic actuators

Giulio Grasso

The use of soft and stretchable materials allows the development of adaptive robotic systems and human-machine interfaces that are more natural and comfortable to interact with. One of the application fields that benefits the most from these compliant mate ...

EPFL2024

Carbon based printed electrodes for DEAs: study of pad, inkjet, and stencil printing

Yves Perriard, Yoan René Cyrille Civet, Thomas Guillaume Martinez, Stefania Maria Aliki Konstantinidi, Armando Matthieu Walter, Simon Holzer

Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) have raised interest due to their remarkable capabilities in various applications, such as soft robotics, haptic feedback systems, and biomedical devices. To harness the full potential of DEAs, the choice of the electr ...

Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)2024

Hydraulically Amplified Electrostatic Taxels (HAXELs) for Full Body Haptics

Herbert Shea, Edouard Franck Vincent Gustave Leroy

The ability to mechanically stimulate touch receptors over the entire body is a key feature for fully immersive and highly realistic virtual reality experience. Haptic stickers, flexible arrays of HAXELs (hydraulically amplified TAXels), that enable cutane ...

Wiley2023

Liquid Metal-Based Sensor Skin Enabling Haptic Perception of Softness

Stéphanie Lacour, Ivan Furfaro, Emilio Fernández Lavado, Haotian Chen

Haptic perception of softness is a unique feature of the human skin that relies on the concurrent measurements of the lateral deformation and compression of the skin during object manipulation. This is challenging to implement in robotics because of combin ...

2023

Dynamic control of high-voltage actuator arrays by light-pattern projection on photoconductive switches

Herbert Shea, Amir Firouzeh, Edouard Franck Vincent Gustave Leroy, Vesna Bacheva, Aiste Balciunaite

The ability to control high-voltage actuator arrays relies, to date, on expensive microelectronic processes or on individual wiring of each actuator to a single off-chip high-voltage switch. Here we present an alternative approach that uses on-chip photoco ...

SPRINGERNATURE2023

Changing Finger Movement Perception: Influence of Active Haptics on Visual Dominance

Ronan Boulic, Bruno Herbelin, Loën Boban

The perception of one’s own body is a complex mechanism that can be disturbed by conflicting sensory information and lead to illusory (mis-) perceptions. Prominent models of multisensory integration propose that sensory streams are integrated according to ...

2022

Foot-Interfaces Control and Human-Robot Interaction in Four-Handed Manipulation

Jacob Hernandez Sanchez

Humans have a great capacity to perform complex manipulations. However, there are many tasks for which two hands are not enough, such as in surgery. For such tasks, a dyad of people is required. However, when not used to work together, a dyad collaboration ...

EPFL2022

Simultaneous Prediction of Wrist and Hand Motions via Wearable Ultrasound Sensing for Natural Control of Hand Prostheses

Xingchen Yang

Simultaneous prediction of wrist and hand motions is essential for the natural interaction with hand prostheses. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-out Gaussian process (MOGP) model and a multi-task deep learning (MTDL) algorithm to achieve simultaneo ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2022

Flexure Variable Stiffness Actuators

Jamie Paik, Mustafa Mete, Frédéric Henri Vaskin Giraud

Series elastic actuators (SEAs) and variable elastic actuators (VSAs) provide shock resistance, energy storage, and stable force control. However, they usually require extra springs, mechanical parts, and transmissions, increasing size, weight, number of m ...

2022

Advancing the Adaptability of Compliant Robot Controllers for Exploration, Interaction, and Manipulation

Farshad Khadivar

As technology continues to evolve, robots are becoming an intrinsic part of our lives. While robots surpass human capabilities in precision and speed, they are far from matching humans' ability to adapt to unexpected changes. Humans can quickly and complia ...

EPFL2022

Soft Touch using Soft Pneumatic Actuator-Skin as a Wearable Haptic Feedback Device

Jamie Paik, Harshal Arun Sonar, Jian-Lin Huang

Understanding the external environment depends heavily on vision, audition, and touch. Like vision and audition, the human sense of touch is complex. Tactile perception is composed of multiple fundamental and physical experiences felt as changes in stiffne ...

2021

Fluid-actuated haptic device and methods for using thereof

Jamie Paik, Zhenishbek Zhakypov

A haptic device is disclosed comprising at least one fluidic actuator operatively connectable with pumping means; and a plurality of movable members mechanically connected with said at least one fluidic actuator, wherein said movable members can perform a ...

2021

Arm-wrist haptic sleeve for drone teleoperation

Dario Floreano, Vivek Ramachandran, Matteo Macchini

Teleoperators rely on both visual and haptic feedback to perform drone teleoperation tasks, such as obstacle avoidance. Haptic feedback becomes essential when visual feedback is compromised, either due to visual occlusions or poor depth perception. However ...

2022

Haptigami: a fingertip haptic interface with vibrotactile and 3-DoF cutaneous force feedback

Jamie Paik, Sagar Dattatray Joshi, Frédéric Henri Vaskin Giraud

Wearable fingertip haptic devices aim to deliver somatosensory feedback for applications such as virtual reality, rehabilitation, and enhancing hardware/physical control interfaces. However, providing various kinds of feedback requires several Degrees of F ...

2022

Comprehensive Interactive Soft Interfaces for Wearable Tactile Feedback

Harshal Arun Sonar

As the field of robotics continues to grow outside the manufacturing environment into our daily lives, the interactions between humans and robots are increasingly becoming close and dynamic. This type of environment requires robots to be less rigid, multi- ...

EPFL2021

Variable Stiffness Folding Joints for Haptic Feedback

Jamie Paik, Fabio Zuliani

Origami robots composed of rigid parts with flexible joints have inherent compliance that enables deployment and reconfiguration for various shape adaptations. The major drawback of such mechanical compliance is its intrinsic softness and lack of controlla ...

IEEE2021

Wearable Haptic Interfaces for Telerobotics

Vivek Ramachandran

Telerobotics is the process by which human operators control the movement of robots to achieve specific tasks. However, conventional control interfaces, such as joysticks and remote controllers, are not intuitive to use for novice users. Training to use th ...

EPFL2021

Reinforcement Learning and Hardware in the Loop for Localized Vibrotactile Feedback in Haptic Surfaces

Yves Perriard, Paolo Germano, Xiaotao Ren, Marc Michel Charles Favier, Camilo Hernandez Mejia

Touch is commonly used to mediate human-machine interactions, notably in the setting of Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs), where touch screens are prevalent. The lack of rich haptic feedback has an impact on the richness and quality of the interaction. Pi ...

IEEE2021

Wearable Haptics for Somatosensory Perception and Self-consciousness

Atena Fadaeijouybari

Recent research has highlighted the crucial role of the processing of somatosensory signals involving the torso for global aspects of Bodily Self Consciousness (BSC), i.e., the experience of the conscious "I" as embodied and localized within bodily space. ...

EPFL2021