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Haptic Intelligence PhD Thesis Defense 15-01-2025 Capturing and Recognizing Multimodal Surface Interactions as Embedded High-Dimensional Distributions Exploring a surface with a handheld tool generates complex contact signals that uniquely encode the surface's properties—a needle hidden in a haystack of data. Humans naturally integrate visual, auditory, and haptic sensory data during these interactions to accurately assess and recognize surfaces. However, enabling artificial systems to perceive and recognize surfaces with human-like proficiency remains a significant challenge. The complexity and dimensionality of multi-modal sensor data, particularly in the intricate and dynamic modality of touch, hinders effective sensing and processing.... Behnam Khojasteh Katherine J. Kuchenbecker
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Haptic Intelligence PhD Thesis Defense 17-12-2024 Precision Haptics in Gait Retraining for Knee Osteoarthritis Gait retraining, or teaching patients to walk in ways that reduce joint loading, shows promise as a conservative intervention for knee osteoarthritis. However, its use in clinical settings remains limited by challenges in prescribing optimal gait patterns and delivering precise, real-time biofeedback. This thesis presents four interconnected studies that aim to address these barriers to clinical adoption: First, a regression model was developed to predict patient-specific biomechanical responses to a gait modification using only simple clinical measures, reducing the need for instrumented g... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Nataliya Rokhmanova
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Haptic Intelligence PhD Thesis Defense 23-10-2024 Data-Driven Needle Puncture Detection for Urgent Medical Care Delivery in Space Needle decompression (ND) is a surgical procedure that treats one of the most preventable causes of trauma-related death: dangerous accumulations of air between the chest wall and the lungs. However, needle-tip overshoot of the target space can result in the inadvertent puncture of critical structures like the heart. This type of complication is fatal without urgent surgical care, which is not available in resource-poor environments like space. Since ND is done blind, operators rely on tool sensations to identify when the needle has reached its target. Needle instrumentation could enable pu... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Rachael Lorsa
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Haptic Intelligence PhD Thesis Defense 05-08-2024 Engineering and Evaluating Naturalistic Vibrotactile Feedback for Telerobotic Assembly Teleoperation allows workers on a construction site to assemble pre-fabricated building components by controlling powerful machines from a safe distance. However, teleoperation's primary reliance on visual feedback limits the operator's efficiency in situations with stiff contact or poor visibility, compromising their situational awareness and thus increasing the difficulty of the task. To bridge this gap, we created AiroTouch, a naturalistic vibrotactile feedback system tailored for use on construction sites but suitable for many other applications of telerobotics. Then we evaluate AiroTou... Yijie Gong Katherine J. Kuchenbecker
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Haptic Intelligence PhD Thesis Defense 23-02-2024 Creating a Haptic Empathetic Robot Animal That Feels Touch and Emotion Social touch, such as a hug or a poke on the shoulder, is an essential aspect of everyday interaction. Humans use social touch to gain attention, communicate needs, express emotions, and build social bonds. Despite its importance, touch sensing is very limited in most commercially available robots. By endowing robots with social-touch perception, one can unlock a myriad of new interaction possibilities. In this talk, I will present my work on creating a Haptic Empathetic Robot Animal (HERA), a koala-like robot for children with autism. I will demonstrate the importance of establishing desig... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Rachael Burns
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Haptic Intelligence PhD Thesis Defense 09-10-2023 Gesture-Based Nonverbal Interaction for Exercise Robots When teaching or coaching, humans augment their words with carefully timed hand gestures, head and body movements, and facial expressions to provide feedback to their students. Robots, however, rarely utilize these nuanced cues. A minimally supervised social robot equipped with these abilities could support people in exercising, physical therapy, and learning new activities. This thesis examines how the intuitive power of human gestures can be harnessed to enhance human-robot interaction. To address this question, this research explores gesture-based interactions to expand the capabilities ... Mayumi Mohan Katherine J. Kuchenbecker
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Haptic Intelligence PhD Thesis Defense 21-12-2022 Multi-Timescale Representation Learning of Human and Robot Haptic Interactions The sense of touch is one of the most crucial components of the human sensory system. It allows us to safely and intelligently interact with the physical objects and environment around us. By simply touching or dexterously manipulating an object, we can quickly infer a multitude of its properties. For more than fifty years, researchers have studied how humans physically explore and form perceptual representations of objects. Some of these works proposed the paradigm through which human haptic exploration is presently understood: humans use a particular set of exploratory procedures to... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Ben Richardson
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Haptic Intelligence PhD Thesis Defense 12-10-2022 Understanding the Influence of Moisture on Fingerpad-Surface Interactions This dissertation investigates the influence of moisture on fingerpad-surface interactions from diverse perspectives. First, we examine the extent to which moisture on the finger contributes to the sensation of stickiness during contact with glass. Second, we investigate the representative material properties of a finger at three distinct moisture levels, since the softness of human skin varies significantly with moisture. The third perspective is friction; we examine how the contact conditions, including the moisture of a finger, determine the available friction force opposing lateral slid... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Saekwang Nam
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Haptic Intelligence PhD Thesis Defense 12-08-2021 HuggieBot: An Interactive Hugging Robot with Visual and Haptic Perception Hugs are one of the first forms of contact and affection humans experience. Receiving a hug is one of the best ways to feel socially supported, and the lack of social touch can have severe adverse effects on an individual's well-being. Due to the prevalence and health benefits of hugging, roboticists are interested in creating robots that can hug humans as seamlessly as humans hug other humans. However, hugs are complex affective interactions that need to adapt to the height, body shape, and preferences of the hugging partner, and they often include intra-hug gestures like squeezes. This di... Alexis Block Katherine J. Kuchenbecker
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Haptic Intelligence PhD Thesis Defense 06-10-2020 Delivering Expressive and Personalized Fingertip Tactile Cues Wearable haptic devices have seen growing interest in recent years, but providing realistic tactile feedback is not a challenge that is soon to be solved. Daily interactions with physical objects elicit complex sensations at the fingertips. Furthermore, human fingertips exhibit a broad range of physical dimensions and perceptive abilities, adding increased complexity to the task of simulating haptic interactions in a compelling manner. However, as the applications of wearable haptic feedback grow, concerns of wearability and generalizability often persuade tactile device designers to simpli... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Eric Young
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