A novel fingertip haptic device for display of local contact geometry

This paper presents a new concept of fingertip haptic device for the display of local contact geometry on the user´s fingerpad. We propose an extension of the encountered haptic interface concept (Y. Sato et al., 2004), in order to build an active haptic thimble, that is portable and can be fixed to the user´s finger. The device is endowed with an actuation system that controls the motion of a platform, that can come in contact with the fingerpad with different orientations and at different fingerpad locations, simulating the contact with a virtual surface. A prototype of the device has been built and tested and is presented throughout the paper.