Forum Discussion
Haptic: A Potential Solution
Hello, After watching Michael Abrash's OC2 keynote, my mind has been endlessly imagining solutions to these haptic problems both in the short and long term. I wanted to present these ideas in case ...
I think it's some great thoughts!
I did a project involving the microcontrol of Nitinol wire which contracts by ~5% when heated (it needs a smaller restoring force to restretch it). Very thin wires were actuated, eight individual wires were heated via PWM from a single darlington driver chip. the eight wires drove a very small 4 DOF robot arm, complimetary pull/pull wires for each joint.
I can certainly see it working for the soft touch, the problem of one size fits all would require some elastic to be in the loop, indeed without it any annular wires would constrict blood flow in fingers/limbs, even when driven by fractions of a Watt.
The idea of distracting the mind with a soft touch when locking a limb to simulate hard touch sounds very interesting.
For the soft touch, maybe not just annular wires but also pinching wires; like tiny stars or crosses woven into the fabric, when actuated they would cause the surrounding fabric to draw in, and if the interior of the suit were friction bound to the skin, then the skin would follow.
For a hi res suit the addressing logic could be perhaps distributed throughout the suit on some kind of serial bus woven right in using small chips or microboards.
Speaking of resolution, the skin has diffrerent spatial resolutions depending on area, like this:
I did a project involving the microcontrol of Nitinol wire which contracts by ~5% when heated (it needs a smaller restoring force to restretch it). Very thin wires were actuated, eight individual wires were heated via PWM from a single darlington driver chip. the eight wires drove a very small 4 DOF robot arm, complimetary pull/pull wires for each joint.
I can certainly see it working for the soft touch, the problem of one size fits all would require some elastic to be in the loop, indeed without it any annular wires would constrict blood flow in fingers/limbs, even when driven by fractions of a Watt.
The idea of distracting the mind with a soft touch when locking a limb to simulate hard touch sounds very interesting.
For the soft touch, maybe not just annular wires but also pinching wires; like tiny stars or crosses woven into the fabric, when actuated they would cause the surrounding fabric to draw in, and if the interior of the suit were friction bound to the skin, then the skin would follow.
For a hi res suit the addressing logic could be perhaps distributed throughout the suit on some kind of serial bus woven right in using small chips or microboards.
Speaking of resolution, the skin has diffrerent spatial resolutions depending on area, like this: