Online Recognition of Environment Properties by Using Bilateral Control

The topic of this thesis is identification of the mechanical impedance of an unknown environment. Through the use of bilateral control based on DOB and RFOB structures, position, speed and force information are gathered and analyzed while performing continuous contact with the environment. The nonlinear Hunt-Crossley model is preferred over the classic Kelvin-Voigt model. Particular attention is given to the precise recognition of contact and the detection of an occurring deformation.ope

Musical Haptics

Haptic Musical Instruments; Haptic Psychophysics; Interface Design and Evaluation; User Experience; Musical Performanc

Novel Haptic Cueing for UAV Tele-Operation.

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is continuously increasing both for military and civilian operations. The degree of automation inside an UAV has reached the capability of high levels of autonomy, increasing but human participation/action is still a requirement to ensure an ultimate level of safety for the mission. Direct remote piloting is often required for a board range of situations; this is true especially for larger UAVs, where a fault might be dangerous for the platform but even for the other entities of its environment (people, building etc.). Unfortunately the physical separation between pilot/operator and the UAV reduces greatly the situational awareness; this has a negative impact on system performance in the presence of remote and unforeseen environmental constraints and disturbances. This is why this thesis is dedicated to the study of means to increase the level of situational awareness of the UAV operator. The sense of telepresence is very important in teleoperation, and it appears reasonable, and it has already been shown in the literature, that extending the visual feedback with force feedback is able to complement the visual information (when missing or limited). An artificially recreated sense of touch (haptic) may allow the operator to better perceive information from the remote aircraft state, the environment and its constraints, hopefully preventing dangerous situations. This thesis introdues first a novel classification for haptic aid systems in two large classes: Direct Haptic Aid (DHA) and Indirect Haptic Aid (IHA), then, after showing that almost all existing aid concepts belong to the first class, focuses on IHA and tries to show that classical applications (that used a DHA approach) can be revised in a IHA fashion. The novel IHA systems produce different sensations, which in most cases may appear as exactly "opposite in sign" from the corresponding DHA; these sensations can provide valuable cues for the pilot, both in terms of improvement of performance and "level of appreciation". Furthermore, it will be shown that the novel cueing algorithms, which were designed just to appear "natural" to the operator, and not to directly help the pilot in his task (as in the DHA cases), can outperform the corresponding DHA systems. Three case studies were selected: obstacle avoidance, wind gust rejection, and a combination of the two. For all the cases, DHA and IHA systems were designed and compared against baseline performance with no haptic aid. Test results show that a net improvement in terms of performance is provided by employing the IHA cuse instead of both the DHA cues or the visual cues only. Both professional pilots and naïve subjects were used in some of the experiments. The perceived feelings transmitted by the haptic cues, strongly depend by the type of the experiment and the quality of the participants: the professional pilots, for instance, retained the DHA the most helpful force while they preferred IHA because they found it more natural and because they felt a better control authority on the aircraft; different results were obtained with naive participants. In the end, this thesis aim is to show that the IHA philosophy is a valid and promising alternative to the other commonly used, and published in the scientific literature, approaches which fall in the DHA category. Finally the haptic cueing for the obstacle avoidance task was tested in the presence of time delay in the communication link, as in a classical bilateral teleoperation scheme. The Master was provide with an admittance controller and an observer for force exerted by the human on the stick was developed. Experiments have shown that the proposed system is capable of standing substantial communication delays

Musical Haptics

Haptic Musical Instruments; Haptic Psychophysics; Interface Design and Evaluation; User Experience; Musical Performanc

Does It Ping or Pong? Auditory and Tactile Classification of Materials by Bouncing Events

Two experiments studied the role of impact sounds and vibrations in classification of materials. The task consisted of feeling on an actuated surface and listening through headphones to the recorded feedback of a ping-pong ball hitting three flat objects respectively made of wood, plastic, and metal, and then identifying their material. In Experiment 1, sounds and vibrations were recorded by keeping the objects in mechanical isolation. In Experiment 2, recordings were taken while the same objects stood on a table, causing their resonances to fade faster due to mechanical coupling with the support. A control experiment, where participants listened to and touched the real objects in mechanical isolation, showed high accuracy of classification from either sounds (90% correct) or vibrations (67% correct). Classification of reproduced bounces in Experiments 1 and 2 was less precise. In both experiments, the main effect of material was statistically significant; conversely, the main effect of modality (auditory or tactile) was significant only in the control. Identification of plastic and especially metal was less accurate in Experiment 2, suggesting that participants, when possible, classified materials by longer resonance tails. Audio-tactile summation of classification accuracy was found, suggesting that multisensory integration influences the perception of materials. Such results have prospective application to the nonvisual design of virtual buttons, which is the object of our current research

Haptics: Science, Technology, Applications

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Applications, EuroHaptics 2022, held in Hamburg, Germany, in May 2022. The 36 regular papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 129 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: haptic science; haptic technology; and haptic applications

Musical Haptics

This Open Access book offers an original interdisciplinary overview of the role of haptic feedback in musical interaction. Divided into two parts, part I examines the tactile aspects of music performance and perception, discussing how they affect user experience and performance in terms of usability, functionality and perceived quality of musical instruments. Part II presents engineering, computational, and design approaches and guidelines that have been applied to render and exploit haptic feedback in digital musical interfaces. Musical Haptics introduces an emerging field that brings together engineering, human-computer interaction, applied psychology, musical aesthetics, and music performance. The latter, defined as the complex system of sensory-motor interactions between musicians and their instruments, presents a well-defined framework in which to study basic psychophysical, perceptual, and biomechanical aspects of touch, all of which will inform the design of haptic musical interfaces. Tactile and proprioceptive cues enable embodied interaction and inform sophisticated control strategies that allow skilled musicians to achieve high performance and expressivity. The use of haptic feedback in digital musical interfaces is expected to enhance user experience and performance, improve accessibility for disabled persons, and provide an effective means for musical tuition and guidance

Haptics Rendering and Applications

There has been significant progress in haptic technologies but the incorporation of haptics into virtual environments is still in its infancy. A wide range of the new society's human activities including communication, education, art, entertainment, commerce and science would forever change if we learned how to capture, manipulate and reproduce haptic sensory stimuli that are nearly indistinguishable from reality. For the field to move forward, many commercial and technological barriers need to be overcome. By rendering how objects feel through haptic technology, we communicate information that might reflect a desire to speak a physically- based language that has never been explored before. Due to constant improvement in haptics technology and increasing levels of research into and development of haptics-related algorithms, protocols and devices, there is a belief that haptics technology has a promising future