Ferro-fluid based portable fingertip haptic display and its preliminary experimental evaluation

Numerous studies have been conducted to develop a tactile device for providing convincing tactile feedback. However, most of the devices are limited in portability, and restricted to delivering either texture information with vibration cues or contact orientation with force feedback. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no wearable tactile display, which can display texture information together with contact orientation. In this paper, we propose a ferro-fluid based tactile display, which is lightweight and wearable and can replicate convincing contact orientation together with texture information. New design principle of introducing ferro-fluid and minimizing moving actuator components and replacing them with permanent magnet, allows the device to be compact and increases its portability. This also enables it to provide both contact orientation and texture cues. Preliminary experimental evaluation for force profile on fingernail and fingertip has been carried out. In addition, experiments for curvature discrimination and cuing simultaneous orientation and vibrational information by using an experimental prototype have also been conducted.