Quantifying the Quality of Haptic Interfaces
Shape-Changing Haptic Interfaces
Generating Clear Vibrotactile Cues with Magnets Embedded in a Soft Finger Sheath
Salient Full-Fingertip Haptic Feedback Enabled by Wearable Electrohydraulic Actuation
Cutaneous Electrohydraulic (CUTE) Wearable Devices for Pleasant Broad-Bandwidth Haptic Cues
Modeling Finger-Touchscreen Contact during Electrovibration
Perception of Ultrasonic Friction Pulses
Vibrotactile Playback for Teaching Sensorimotor Skills in Medical Procedures
CAPT Motor: A Two-Phase Ironless Motor Structure
4D Intraoperative Surgical Perception: Anatomical Shape Reconstruction from Multiple Viewpoints
Visual-Inertial Force Estimation in Robotic Surgery
Enhancing Robotic Surgical Training
AiroTouch: Naturalistic Vibrotactile Feedback for Large-Scale Telerobotic Assembly
Optimization-Based Whole-Arm Teleoperation for Natural Human-Robot Interaction
Finger-Surface Contact Mechanics in Diverse Moisture Conditions
Computational Modeling of Finger-Surface Contact
Perceptual Integration of Contact Force Components During Tactile Stimulation
Dynamic Models and Wearable Tactile Devices for the Fingertips
Novel Designs and Rendering Algorithms for Fingertip Haptic Devices
Dimensional Reduction from 3D to 1D for Realistic Vibration Rendering
Prendo: Analyzing Human Grasping Strategies for Visually Occluded Objects
Learning Upper-Limb Exercises from Demonstrations
Minimally Invasive Surgical Training with Multimodal Feedback and Automatic Skill Evaluation
Efficient Large-Area Tactile Sensing for Robot Skin
Haptic Feedback and Autonomous Reflexes for Upper-limb Prostheses
Gait Retraining
Modeling Hand Deformations During Contact
Intraoperative AR Assistance for Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery
Immersive VR for Phantom Limb Pain
Visual and Haptic Perception of Real Surfaces
Haptipedia
Gait Propulsion Trainer
TouchTable: A Musical Interface with Haptic Feedback for DJs
Exercise Games with Baxter
Intuitive Social-Physical Robots for Exercise
How Should Robots Hug?
Hierarchical Structure for Learning from Demonstration
Fabrication of HuggieBot 2.0: A More Huggable Robot
Learning Haptic Adjectives from Tactile Data
Feeling With Your Eyes: Visual-Haptic Surface Interaction
S-BAN
General Tactile Sensor Model
Insight: a Haptic Sensor Powered by Vision and Machine Learning
Natural Embodied Touch
Human fingertips are marvelously sensitive to minute variations in surface properties and contact conditions, providing the soft yet resilient medium that enables dexterous manipulation. Although we use them constantly, fingertips are not fully understood, nor are all the mechanisms that underpin human haptic perception, partially due to this sense's tight coupling with movement.
Humans typically have the impression they are directly perceiving the properties of things they physically touch, but all one can actually sense is how such interactions deform, vibrate, heat up, or otherwise change our skin. Said another way, it is one's body that is instrumented, not objects in the world. Furthermore, each person can experience the world only through their own body, and bodies vary enormously. Over the years, these simple ideas have progressively convinced us that the geometrical and material properties of the body fundamentally affect its physical interactions and the way those interactions are perceived.
We call this research field natural embodied touch to emphasize our scientific fascination with how the body itself influences touch, starting with finger-surface contact. We have been especially interested in simple interactions such as pressing or sliding on a smooth, flat surface to elucidate fundamental aspects of these phenomena. Beyond their core scientific insights, some of the resulting findings have implications for our research on artificial tactile sensing and fingertip haptic rendering.
Our work in this field branched out into understanding natural embodied touch of animals when we hired Andrew K. Schulz as a new postdoctoral researcher in January 2023. Andrew's doctorate at Georgia Tech focused on the biomechanics of the elephant trunk across length scales. He and Katherine have since launched several interrelated research projects in animal touch, starting with a major collaborative investigation into the characteristics of the whiskers that cover the thick-skinned trunks of elephants. Interestingly, the haptic interactions of these keratin-based structures bear significant resemblance to tool-mediated surface interactions by humans, as haptic vibrations travel from the contact through the whisker or the stylus to sensitive skin tissue in both cases. Thus, our experience with human touch can sometimes facilitate insights about animal touch.