A Compact Skin-Shear Device using a Lead-Screw Mechanism

We present a skin-shear actuator based on the lead screw mechanism. The lead screw mechanism is simple, reliable, offers fewer components, and accommodates into compact form- factors. We show mechanical design of a single assembly unit and implement multiple units in a single handheld device. We evaluate the actuator in one instrumentation-based test and one preliminary user study. Tests show that the actuator performance matches with the open-loop control scheme when no load is placed on the actuator. The performance deteriorates with loading, particularly when quicker and high amplitude stroke are required. The user study shows that information throughput with the skin-shear is comparable to vibrations through three digits on the hand. It is shown that small compact actuators (~5g) with efficient mechanisms can render displacements (>3mm) and forces (>1N) for easily differentiating skin-shear cues.