Optimization Of Vibrotactile Device And Experimental Study On Tactile Perception Characteristics

Haptic is one of the most important sensing channel and has significant advantages compared to vision and audition. It is of great significance for the study of tactile information rendering and perception characteristics. This paper focus on the psychophysics experiments of vibrotactile perception and designs a haptic touch pad to transfer the navigation information for the visually impaired. The major work of this paper is composed of the following parts:Firstly, based on the results of previous researchers, an optimized vibrotactile pad is designed for the experimental study on human haptic perception characters and the transfer of navigation information for the blind.Secondly, two fundamental psychophysics experiments are carried out in order to design concise and effective spatial-temporal tactile information encoding. Experiment 1 is for the study of apparent movement phenomenon characteristic in tactile expression. It analyses apparent movement phenomenon characteristic based on optimizated device and factors effect on the apparent movement phenomenon, such as vibration intensity and vibration time. Experiment 2 is for the study of linear illusion phenomenon perception characteristic. Compared with Fick Illusion, it analyses the linear perception characteristic of people’s awareness of straight lines in different directions and different scales. Through the analysis of the data, it investigates how objective parameters such as vibration intensity etc. effect the results of awareness, and builds the matching model to predict the results of the line segment length expression and perception.Finally, based on the results of characteristics perception experiments, a vibrotactile touch pad is designed for the blind to transfer the environment and navigation information when they are walking outside. The encoding of the direction and obstacle information is fully taking advantage of the perception experiments. And the effectiveness of the encoding is verified by a site of experiments.The research focus and innovations of this thesis are:(1) Designing a double-layer tactile sensing pad based on the disk motor and improving the integration and portability of the device; (2) Studying the characteristics of apparent movement and linear illusion phenomenon and establishing a regression model; (3) Designing navigation information coding accord with the people’s apperception rule and expressing the information exactly and completely.