Tactile Sensing, Information, and Feedback via Wave Propagation (eBook)

A longstanding goal of haptic engineering is to develop haptic interfaces that can provide realistic sensations of touch. A fundamental step towards this goal is to understand what mechanical tactile signals the hand feels during daily touch interactions. This book reveals the complex patterns of mechanical waves propagating throughout the hand that can be elicited even by simple touch interactions, which helps in expanding existing knowledge of tactile function beyond the region of near skin-object contact and inspires new designs for haptic sensing and feedback technologies.

The first part of this book describes new methods for capturing dynamic, spatially distributed tactile signals in the whole hand during natural hand interactions. The second part characterizes these signals and evaluates how well and how efficiently they encode the information of touch, relating to the transmission of mechanical waves in hand tissues. The final part demonstrates how these findings can be utilized to create novel haptic effects and tactile displays.

Tactile Sensing, Information, and Feedback via Wave Propagation provides a unique view of tactile sensing and feedback and will appeal to researchers, engineers, and students who are interested in learning cutting-edge haptic science and technology.

Yitian Shao is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. His research focuses on wearable technologies, haptic interfaces, augmented/virtual reality, and artificial tactile sensing. His long-term research goal is to create haptic feedback technologies that provide immersive experiences for users to touch and interact with objects in a virtual environment. He received his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2020. He also earned an M.S. degree from UCSB in 2019. He received a B.E. degree in electrical engineering and automation from Tianjin University, China, in 2013. He worked as a research intern at Microsoft Applied Sciences Group in 2019.His awards include Humboldt Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers, EuroHaptics Society Best Ph.D. Thesis Award, UCSB ECE Ph.D. Dissertation Fellowship, and several best paper awards and nominations at IEEE World Haptics and IEEE Haptic Symposium. His research has been published in top-tier journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Science Advances. The haptic technologies developed in his research resulted in three patents based on a filing supported in part by Facebook Reality Labs.