Frequency Modulation Based Vibrotactile Device for Teleoperation

This study investigated how people achieve pointing and path following tasks using a vibrotactile device. In pointing tasks, subjects are asked to reach a target as fast as possible guided by two types of tactile information generated by a specific glove we developed. The first type of information is a constant vibrating stimulation and the second one is a frequency modulation based vibration. A comparison using the visual channel when performing the same task is done is presented. For each modality, two experiments were performed. The first one is 1D: the subjects reach a target situated on a line. The second one is 2D and the target is in the horizontal plane. The results we obtained showed that tactile based pointing tasks obey to the classical Fitts’ law. Furthermore, we show that the frequency modulation based vibration mode is more useful than the constant one for pointing tasks. In path following experiments, we have a comparison between global and local visual feedback. Results show that in case of lacking global spatial information, vibrotactile feedback can give similar performance as visual feedback.