Fingertip Guiding Manipulator for Blind Persons to Create Mental Images by Switch Passive/Active Hybrid Line-Drawing Explorations

摘要

The authors developed a fingertip guiding system which consists of a haptic manipulator (PHANTOM Omni) to help a blind person to create mental images of a pre-planned trajectory. When using this system, the person will grasp a stylus (a pen-shaped stick) of the haptic manipulator by his/her fingertip. The system is equipped with dual mode fingertip guiding function which allows switching between modes (a passive or an active mode) in recognizing the image provided. In passive mode, the system will guide and pull a person's hand, and it will also provide force feedback to his/her fingertip, while constraining the fingertips motion along the trajectory. On the other hand, in active mode, the system will guide and provide force feedback at the fingertips of the subject but allows the persons to freely move his/her fingertip on the trajectory. The main objective of the research is to create a hybrid exploration system which consists of active and passive modes. In this paper, we targeted our scope on the active mode system. We examined the effectiveness in understanding the trajectory by moving his/her fingertips with haptic manipulator either on a flat surface or in a free aerial space (without any surface provided).It was confirmed that the active system with a flat surface expedites the understanding of the layout's trajectory.