Quantification and Verification of Automobile Interior Textures by a High Performance Tactile-Haptic Interface

This paper presents the development of a tactile-haptic interface for quantifying surface texture properties such as roughness, veins, and softness of automobile interior. This interface will assist the designer to quantify and classify the comfort index of automobile interior design for quality control, as well as provide customers a sensory experience of surface textures so as to determine the desired surface characteristics for each individual customer. To realize this purpose, a high resolution optical tactile sensor for accurately capturing interior surface textures is developed. Based on the intensity information of the achieved 2-D tactile image, the contact area map and the 3-D shape of the surface texture is recovered. In addition, a high performance haptic electrotactile array device was fabricated for rendering the tactile sensation of surface texture in the fingertip of the designer/customer. Calibration and experimental results verified the high performance of the developed tactile haptic interface. This interface can be further developed to be an effective and efficient knowledge based evaluation system for improving automobile interior design