A haptic direction indicator using the gyro effect

The preliminary study described in this paper is about the assessment of the control parameters of a non-grounded haptic device giving kinaesthetic stimuli to indicate to the user a direction to follow to reach a target location. The haptic sensation is created by tilting one or more rotating flywheels along an axis, controlling the direction and the amount of tilt, the velocity of the tilt (during the pulse and the repositioning of the flywheel), the frequency of pulses. The current prototype has only one flywheel and is able to tilt along a single axis, thus indicating only “right” or “left” direction. The experiments performed with the prototype allowed us to define a set of requirements (torque produced, duration of the stimuli) for a more complex prototype (2 flywheels and 2 DOF) to be developed and tested as future work.