–This paper proposes that there are ultimately only two topical tactile feedback generation modalities for haptic human interfaces which allow the human operator to handle either (i) temporary VR-based material replicas of the local geometric and/or force profile at the contact areas of an unlimited set of generic objects that could virtually be handled during the manipulation, or (ii) permanent material replicas of a limited set of typical objects. Examples of tactile human interfaces developed by the authors for telerobotic blind tactile exploration of objects, for telerobotic hapto-visual stylus-style tool manipulation are presented to illustrate the proposed approach. A NN architecture allowing for the modelling of the elastic properties of 3D objects from experimental tactile and range imaging data is also presented.
Emil M. Petriu, Pierre Payeur, Ana-Maria Cretu