Optimized Design of a Haptic Unit for Vibrotactile Amplitude Modulation

Communicating information to users is a crucial aspect of human-machine interaction. Vibrotactile feedback encodes information into spatiotemporal vibrations, enabling users to perceive tactile sensations. It offers advantages such as lightweight, wearability, and high stability, with broad applications in sensory substitution, virtual reality, education, and healthcare. However, existing haptic unit designs lack amplitude modulation capabilities, which limits their applications. This paper proposed an optimized design of the haptic unit from the perspective of vibration amplitude modulation. A modified elastic model was developed to describe the propagation and attenuation mechanisms of vibration in the skin. Based on the model, two types of hierarchical architectural design were proposed. The design incorporated various materials arranged in multiple layers to amplify or attenuate the vibration amplitude as it traveled through the structure. An experimental platform was built to evaluate the performance of the optimized design.