One of the most salient haptic characteristics of objects is surface texture. Psychophysics studies have identified several key factors that affect perception of roughness during exploration of surface textures. Inspired by these recent findings, we develop the first force model for haptic display of interaction between two textured objects. We describe how our force model accounts for important elements identified by psychophysics studies. We then analyze and validate our model by comparing our simulation results against actual perceptual studies. We show that our model captures similar effects to those observed in the earlier experiments on roughness perception.
Miguel A. Otaduy, Ming C. Lin