HelloHapticWorld: A haptics educational kit for interacting with robots

User interactions with the recent smart-phones and tablets are visually rich but poor in the sense of touch and thus is not fully immersive. We propose HelloHapticWorld: a haptics educational kit which uses the variable friction of the TPad to virtually simulate the haptic sensation of tele-operated robot onto the fingertips of the user. The kit contains a mobile robot controlled by TPad and a reconfigurable field consisting of obstacles and road slopes of different sizes and shapes. The frequency and amplitude of the signals are modulated for representing slope and distance informations. Psychophysical analysis on 5 adult subjects for the signal excitation of haptic feedback were conducted using the method of constant stimuli based on which sinusoidal waveform rendering was selected for haptic slope and distance rendering. Methods of magnitude estimation and Confusion matrix analysis was further used to evaluate the linearity of haptic obstacle perception and discriminability of haptic slope perception respectively. The result shows 81.2% slope discrimination and 90% linear obstacle perception during robot teleoperation using HelloHapticWorld.