A Wearable Fabric-based display for haptic multi-cue delivery

Softness represents one of the most informative haptic properties, which plays a fundamental role in both everyday tasks and more complex procedures. Thus, it is not surprising that much effort has been devoted to designing haptic systems able to suitably reproduce this information. At the same time, wearability has gained an increasing importance as a novel paradigm to enable a more effective and naturalistic human robot interaction. Capitalizing upon our previous works on grounded softness devices, in this paper we present the Wearable Fabric Yielding Display (W-FYD), a fabric-based tactile display for multi-cue delivery that can be worn by user's finger. W-FYD enables to implement both passive and active tactile exploration. Different levels of stiffness can be reproduced by modulating the stretching state of a fabric through two DC motors. An additional vertical degree of freedom is implemented through a lifting mechanism, which enables to convey softness stimuli to the user's finger pad. Furthermore, a sliding effect on the finger can be also induced. Experiments with humans show the effectiveness of W-FYD for haptic multi-cue delivery.