Engineering Touch

I will describe recent work in my lab on haptics, soft electronics, and interactive systems. A longstanding goal in engineering has been to design technologies that are able to reflect the amazing perceptual and motor capabilities of biological systems for touch, including the human hand. This objective turns out to be difficult to achieve, due, not least, to our limited understanding of the mechanics underlying touch sensation, i.e. of what it is that is felt when we touch objects in the world. Some of the challenges involved can be traced to the complexity of the mechanical interactions, the high dimensionality of the signals, the multiple length scales, time scales, and physical regimes involved, and the sensitive dependence of what we feel on what we do - the way that touch-elicited mechanical signals depend on the way we move and contact objects. I will describe research that has aimed at addressing these challenges, and will explain how the results are informing the development of new technologies for wearable computing, virtual reality, and robotics.

Speaker: Von Visell, UC Santa Barbara