A 3-DOF Haptic Feedback System for Displaying Sliding and Torsion Effects Detected by TacTip Sensor

This paper presents a haptic feedback system that provides the user with sliding and twisting (i.e., 3 degrees of freedom) haptic feedback based on tactile sensor detection. The system integrates a TacTip optical tactile sensor with a spherical feedback device, which converts tactile detection into motor commands. In the feedback device, a central ball driven by 3 omniwheels can provide sliding, twisting and hybrid feedback. For tactile sensing, we developed two image processing methods to detect motion on the surface of the TacTip sensor. One method calculates the accumulation of key pins' movements to detect sliding motion; the other is based on linear regression of key pins to detect twisting motion. Three experiments were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the system. In the first two experiments, we evaluated the central ball's motions for sliding and twisting feedback. In the third experiment, we tested the system's ability to support human-system interaction by having the user interact with the feedback system. The results of our experiments demonstrate that the proposed tactile feedback system can provide real-time and quantified haptic feedback, and it can support human-system interaction, making it a promising tool for various applications.