Design of a novel finger haptic interface for contact and orientation display

A new portable device for haptic interaction with virtual environments is presented. It is a lightweight interface for the fingertips, designed for providing cutaneous feedback and displaying the contact - non contact transition in highly immersive virtual environments. In this paper the kinematics, the mechanical design and the control system are described. The device has been mounted on a kinesthetic haptic interface which tracks its position: the overall system can provide both cutaneous and kinesthetic feedback. Finally the performance of the portable device in a simple task of shape exploration has been evaluated and compared to a kinesthetic haptic interface.