Research on the Perception of Roughness Based on Vibration

We design a novel vibrotactile display that can simulate texture of surface. On the haptic display, texture information is presented to the user’s fingertip by composing transverse vibration and longitudinal vibration. Experiments were carried out to investigate the haptic perception by using the vibrotactile device. The focus of this study is roughness, which is one of the fundamental features of texture. The first experiment was to detect the minimum amplitude that the observer could have the tactile feeling at different frequencies. The threshold gradually decreased with the increasing of frequency. The second experiment was to find out how the vibration parameters such as amplitude and frequency affected the roughness perception. The increase of amplitude leads to the increase of perceptual roughness. The third experiment was to investigate how to simulate textures by combining the parameters of vibrotactile stimulus. The participants regulated the amplitude and frequency of the vibrotactile stimulus until they got the haptic perception which was equal to the reference texture. They always used a vibrotactile stimulus with a high amplitude and a low frequency to describe the roughness of real object. And during the investigation they preferred to adjust amplitude rather than frequency, which means tactile perception is more sensitive to amplitude than to frequency. This paper illustrates the roughness rendering technique based on transverse vibration and longitudinal vibrations and provides suggestions on improving tactile perception.