Tactile actuators using SMA micro-wires and the generation of texture sensation from images

Humans communicate with each other by using not only verbal media but also the five senses such as vision, audition, olfaction and tactile sensations. Various devices and systems have been introduced for supporting human communication, and most of them are based on visual and auditory media. For presenting tactile sensations, some tactile actuators have been introduced recently, however these actuators require real objects to generate the various tactile sensations and input data to be associated with output tactile sensations should be prepared manually by a user. This study introduces an algorithm to automatically generate parameters from an object's image for driving tactile actuators. A tactile presentation system is constructed, and the validity of the texture sensations is verified by a user's experiment.