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Archivio digitale delle tesi discusse presso l’Università di Pisa

Tesi etd-03242012-202906


Tipo di tesi
Tesi di dottorato di ricerca
Autore
BIANCHI, MATTEO
URN
etd-03242012-202906
Titolo
On the Role of Haptic Synergies in Modelling the Sense of Touch and in Designing Artificial Haptic Systems
Settore scientifico disciplinare
ING-INF/04
Corso di studi
AUTOMATICA, ROBOTICA E BIOINGEGNERIA
Relatori
tutor Scilingo, Enzo Pasquale
tutor Prof. Bicchi, Antonio
Parole chiave
  • Cutaneous Sensing
  • Glove-based Systems
  • Haptic Interface Integration
  • Haptic Interfaces
  • Kinaesthesia
  • Lump Display
  • Modelling of Sense of Touch
  • Optimal Design
  • Robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery
  • Synergies
  • Tactile Displays
Data inizio appello
21/06/2012
Consultabilità
Completa
Riassunto
This thesis aims at defining strategies to reduce haptic information complexity, with minimum loss of information, to design more effective haptic interfaces and artificial systems. Nowadays, haptic device design can be complex. Moreover, the artificial reproduction of the full spectrum of haptic information is a daunting task and far to be achieved. The central idea of this work is to simplify this information by exploiting the concept of synergies, which has been developed to describe the covariation patterns in multi-digit movements and forces in common motor tasks. Here I extend and exploit it also in the perceptual domain, to find projections from the heterogeneous information manifold, generated by the mechanics of touch, and what can be actually perceived by humans. In this manner, design trade-off between costs, feasibility and quality of the rendered perception can be individuated.
With this as motivation, referring to cutaneous sensing, I discuss the development of a fabric-based softness display inspired by ``Contact Area Spread Rate'' hypothesis as well as the characterization of an air-jet lump display method for Robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery. Considering kinaesthesia, I analyze the problem of hand posture estimation from noisy and limited in number measures provided by low cost hand pose sensing devices. By using the information about how humans most frequently use their hands, system performance is enhanced and optimal system design enabled.
Finally, an integrated device, where a conventional kinaesthetic haptic display is combined with a cutaneous softness one, is proposed, showing that the fidelity by which softness is artificially rendered increases.
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