HaPPArray: Haptic Pneumatic Pouch Array for Feedback in handheld Robots

Haptic feedback can provide operators of hand-held robots with active guidance during challenging tasks and with critical information on environment interactions. Yet for such haptic feedback to be effective, it must be lightweight, capable of integration into a hand-held form factor, and capable of displaying easily discernible cues. We present the design and evaluation of HaPPArray - a haptic pneumatic pouch array - where the pneumatic pouches can be actuated alone or in sequence to provide information to the user. A 3x3 array of pouches was integrated into a handle, representative of an interface for a hand-held robot. When actuated individually, users were able to correctly identify the pouch being actuated with 86% accuracy, and when actuated in sequence, users were able to correctly identify the associated direction cue with 89 % accuracy. These results, along with a demonstration of how the direction cues can be used for haptic guidance of a medical robot, suggest that HaPPArray can be an effective approach for providing haptic feedback for hand-held robots.