Quantitative measurement of haptic perception

Development and evaluation of teleoperators and haptic virtual environment technologies require objective quantitative measures of haptic quality. In this paper a theoretical framework and experimental procedures are introduced for quantitative assessment of haptic perception. Human haptic perception of objects is distorted and uncertain as well. Perceptual distortion is defined to be a systematic bias of perception with respect to an objective standard. Perceptual uncertainty is defined to be a measure of statistical distribution of percepts. A set of mathematical tools is presented to quantify perceptual distortion and uncertainty. Two experiments are presented which apply these tools to investigate the fundamental structure of human haptic perception