HCR: Haptic Continuum Robot for Multi-Modal Cutaneous Feedback

Cutaneous haptic feedback provides a sense of touch by displaying sensations — such as vibration, skin stretch, or normal force — directly to the skin. While the majority of these devices have been designed to display one main haptic sensation, recent work has begun to explore the creation of multi-modal haptic devices, capable of rendering a variety of cutaneous cues. In this work, we investigate using the tip and body of a continuum robot to directly render multiple cutaneous cues to the fingerpad. We present the design of a device that consists of two Haptic Continuum Robots (HCRs) that is capable of rendering four distinct haptic cues— skin stretch, skin slip, normal indentation, and vibration. We present and validate a model of the proposed HCR and characterize the device performance. Finally, we conduct a preliminary haptic sensation identification study, which showed that users were able to correctly identify the displayed haptic sensation with 90% accuracy.