Towards an understanding of how humans perceive stiffness during bimanual exploration
This work addresses the problem of understanding human haptic perception for applications in robotics and virtual reality, but it is incremental as it builds on existing psychophysical methods without introducing new paradigms.
The study tackled the problem of how humans perceive torsional stiffness during bimanual exploration by using a psychophysical paradigm with haptic devices, finding that just-noticeable differences (JNDs) were evaluated across seven conditions and four exploration modes, such as bimanual and unimanual, to inform future research on stiffness perception.
In this paper, an experimental testbed and associated psychophysical paradigm are presented for understanding how people discriminate torsional stiffness using wrist rotation about their forearm. Featured in the testbed are two 1-DoF rotary kinesthetic haptic devices. An adaptive staircase was used to evaluate JNDs for a stiffness discrimination task where participants explored virtual torsion springs by rotating their forearms. The JNDs were evaluated across seven different conditions, under four different exploration modes: bimanual, unimanual, bimanual feedback for unimanual displacement, and unimanual feedback for bimanual displacement. The discrimination results will inform future investigation into understanding how stiffness percepts vary.