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Research Overview

Natural Embodied Touch

Finger-Surface Contact Mechanics in Diverse Moisture Conditions

Perceptual Integration of Contact Force Components During Fingertip Sliding

Material Intelligence of Animal Whiskers

Artificial Touch Sensing and Processing

Giving Touch to Soft Robot Fingertips Using Vision, Audio and Machine Learning

Capturing and Recognizing Multimodal Surface Interactions

Multimodal Puncture Detection for Urgent Percutaneous Therapies

Haptic Actuation

Quantifying the Quality of Haptic Interfaces

Shape-Changing Haptic Interfaces

Generating Clear Vibrotactile Cues with Magnets Embedded in a Soft Finger Sheath

Salient Full-Fingertip Haptic Feedback Enabled by Wearable Electrohydraulic Actuation

Cutaneous Electrohydraulic (CUTE) Wearable Devices for Pleasant Broad-Bandwidth Haptic Cues

Modeling Finger-Touchscreen Contact during Electrovibration

Perception of Ultrasonic Friction Pulses

CAPT Motor: A Two-Phase Ironless Motor Structure

Immersive Teleoperation

4D Intraoperative Surgical Perception: Anatomical Shape Reconstruction from Multiple Viewpoints

Visual-Inertial Force Estimation in Robotic Surgery

Enhancing Robotic Surgical Training

AiroTouch: Naturalistic Vibrotactile Feedback for Large-Scale Telerobotic Assembly

Optimization-Based Whole-Arm Teleoperation for Natural Human-Robot Interaction

Human-Robot Interaction

Enhancing HRI through Responsive Multimodal Feedback

Haptic Empathetic Robot Animal (HERA)

How does HuggieBot compare to a human hugging partner?

HuggieBot: Evolution of an Interactive Hugging Robot with Visual and Haptic Perception

Human Movement

Reconstructing Sign-Language Movements from Images and Bioimpedance Measurements

Advancing Gait-Retraining Techniques

Multimodal Sensing Reveals the Dynamics of Time-Constrained Teamwork

Haptic Intelligence

Previous HI Projects

These projects have been completed and are thus no longer being actively pursued by researchers in the Haptic Intelligence Department of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.

Projects

Finger-Surface Contact Mechanics in Diverse Moisture Conditions

The finger's instantaneous contact state with a surface is strongly affected by its peripheral environment. Fluid on the contact surface and the secretion of sweat from the fingerpad's glands cause particularly profound effects... Read more

Development of surface haptic technologies has lately drawn significant attention, in parallel with the growing use of modern electronic devices involving touchscreens. Different haptic scenarios provide active tactile feedback by... Read more

Perceptual Integration of Contact Force Components During Tactile Stimulation

The contact forces we experience when our body interacts with objects provide essential sensory cues that help us understand the world and adapt our behavior. Sliding contact in particular arises in most daily activities, for example,... Read more

Dynamic Models and Wearable Tactile Devices for the Fingertips

Humans regularly use their fingertips to physically explore and manipulate their surroundings. For example, healthy adults can distinguish a near infinite range of textures and can quickly compensate when a grasped object slips... Read more

Novel Designs and Rendering Algorithms for Fingertip Haptic Devices

Wearable haptic devices have seen growing interest in recent years, but providing realistic tactile feedback is a challenge not to be solved soon. Daily interactions with physical objects elicit complex sensations at the fingertips.... Read more

Dimensional Reduction from 3D to 1D for Realistic Vibration Rendering

Unconstrained tool-mediated interaction with a surface generates 3D vibrations that contain high-frequency accelerations in all Cartesian directions. These vibrations convey rich task information, so they need to be captured and... Read more

Prendo: Analyzing Human Grasping Strategies for Visually Occluded Objects

Humans display exemplary skill in manipulating objects and can adapt to highly diverse situations. For example, a human handing over an object modulates their grasp and movements to accommodate their partner's capabilities, which... Read more

Learning Upper-Limb Exercises from Demonstrations

Compared to conventional upper-limb therapies, robotic devices can offer multiple advantages in physical training and rehabilitation. Automation can reduce the workload of rehabilitation professionals and augment their ability to provide... Read more

Minimally Invasive Surgical Training with Multimodal Feedback and Automatic Skill Evaluation

Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) allows surgeons to perform procedures through tiny incisions, thus reducing healing time compared to traditional open surgery. In robot-assisted MIS (RMIS), surgeons control the instruments from a... Read more

Efficient Large-Area Tactile Sensing for Robot Skin

Being able to perceive physical contact is essential for intelligent robots to work well in cluttered everyday environments. Since physical contacts can occur at any location, a successful tactile sensing system should be able to cover... Read more

Haptic Feedback and Autonomous Reflexes for Upper-limb Prostheses

Upper-limb loss prevents amputees from being able to carry out many day-to-day tasks that are necessary for ensuring a good quality of life. Although commercially available prosthetic limbs can replace some of the lost motor function of... Read more

Gait Retraining

Restoring healthy gait after injury, stroke, or joint disease is a core part of the rehabilitation process. Novel haptic devices provide an opportunity to supplement current medical practice to improve walking speed, symmetry, or joint... Read more

Little is known about the shape and properties of the human finger during haptic interaction, as such situations are difficult to instrument. Interestingly, these parameters are essential for designing and controlling wearable... Read more

Intraoperative AR Assistance for Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery

Following recent advances in optics, digital image acquisition, and computer vision, augmented reality (AR) applications are being vigorously researched and effectively deployed in several areas of the healthcare industry. In ... Read more

Up to 90% of individuals who undergo amputation experience a persistent sensation of the missing limb, which is called a phantom limb  A substantial subset of these people feel intense pain in the missing extremity; this ... Read more

Both vision and touch play important roles in human perception of real surfaces. Judging material properties based on only one modality may not give reliable results. For example, many of us have had the experience that... Read more

Haptipedia

Creating haptic experiences often entails inventing, modifying, or selecting specialized hardware. However, experience designers are rarely engineers, and 30 years of haptic inventions are buried in the fragmented literature that... Read more

Walking speed and symmetry are high priorities for people with hemiparesis from stroke. We developed the Gait Propulsion Trainer (GPT) to help such individuals improve their walking abilities by increasing the propulsive force generated... Read more

DJing is a musical activity that involves the blending of songs (mixing) and the rythmic manipulation of sounds (scratching). Traditionally, DJs used vinyl records as their music sources. The vibration of a stylus (needle) in the... Read more

Exercise Games with Baxter

Improvements in healthcare have led to an increase in human life expectancy. Members of this aging population want to stay healthy and active, but many forms of exercise and physical therapy are expensive, boring, or inefficient. Past... Read more

Intuitive Social-Physical Robots for Exercise

Physical activity plays a critical role in maintaining one's health. Past research has shown that well-designed robots can motivate users to perform regular exercise and physical therapy. To understand how people respond to... Read more

Hugs are one of the first forms of contact and affection that humans experience. Not only are hugs a common way to provide comfort, support, or affection, but they have also been shown to have significant health benefits. Hugs can... Read more

Many modern humanoid robots are designed to operate in human environments, like homes and hospitals. If designed well, such robots could help humans accomplish tasks and lower their physical and/or mental workload. As... Read more

Our first HuggieBot research project showed that people are generally accepting of soft, warm robot hugs that squeeze the user and release promptly. In the future we would like to see if robot hugs can provide the same known health... Read more

Humans can form an impression of how a new object feels simply by touching its surfaces with the densely innervated skin of the fingertips. Recent research has focused on endowing robots with similar levels of haptic... Read more

Humans draw on their vast life experience of touching things to make inferences about the objects in their environment; this capability enables one to make haptic judgments before actually touching things. For example, it is... Read more

The S-BAN is a handheld shape-changing haptic interface that utilizes a parallel kinematic structure to deliver 2-DOF spatial information over a continuous workspace. S-BAN stands for Shape-Based Assistance for Navigation. The device was... Read more

Robots working in unstructured environments and alongside people need to be able to sense contact information from both intentional and unintentional interactions. Soft and skin-like tactile sensors can provide a robot with physical... Read more

Insight: a Haptic Sensor Powered by Vision and Machine Learning

Introduction Video Robots need detailed haptic sensing that covers their complex surfaces to learn effective behaviors in unstructured environments. However, state-of-the-art sensors tend to focus on improving precision and sensitivity,... Read more