A Non-grounded and Encountered-type Haptic Display Using a Drone

Encountered-type haptic displays recreate realistic haptic sensations by producing physical surfaces on demand for a user to explore directly with his or her bare hands. However, conventional encountered-type devices are fixated in the environment thus the working volume is limited. To address the limitation, we investigate the potential of an unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) as a flying motion base for a non-grounded encountered-type haptic device. As a lightweight end-effector, we use a piece of paper hung from the drone to represent the reaction force. Though the paper is limp, the shape of paper is held stable by the strong airflow induced by the drone itself. We conduct two experiments to evaluate the prototype system. First experiment evaluates the reaction force presentation by measuring the contact pressure between the user and the end-effector. Second experiment evaluates the usefulness of the system through a user study in which participants were asked to draw a straight line on a virtual wall represented by the device.