Glove-Through Tactile Information Transmission System

Abstract

By covering the skin with clothes such as gloves, humans have managed to survive in severe environments and undertake dangerous work. However, when we wear covering materials, tactile information is lost; this may decrease working efficiency and degrade the performance of object perception at the moment of contact. In order to address this issue, the concept of a "haptic-through" system that transmits tactile information through a covering material has been proposed. However, the effectiveness of this concept has been verified only by vertically pushing a surface of an object with one finger; there have been no systems proposed that can be used in actual complex finger motion. We constructed a glove-style haptic-through system that can be used in practical finger motion. By using this system, we conducted an experiment to investigate the discrimination threshold of the angle of a rod-shaped object. As a result, the angle discrimination threshold through a glove, with the support of our system, was equivalent to that obtained with bare hands.