Design of a Two-Point-Contact Fingertip Tactile Force Feedback Device

Fingertip tactile force feedback device has been applied to a variety of systems in recent years. However, most of them assume the feedback force concentrating at a point of a plane rather than on a multi-point distribution. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel device to provide a touch sensation by generating two feedback forces distributed in two points of user¡ s finger pad, where the local force at each point is up to 8N. It consists of a tactile feedback module and a control system. Moreover, we design remote interactive tactile experiments to verify the performance of the proposed device. Experimental results show that when the model fingertip is pressed on the different surfaces of objects in a remote environment, our device can generate the corresponding feedback forces to simulate the different touch sensations. The magnitudes of the feedback forces are approximate to those of the contact forces obtained from the model fingertip in the remote environment. Most importantly, the proposed device can bring more realistic contact force reproduction to the user.