Social Touch
Researcher: Xin Zhu
Summary: Touch is an essential component of our interpersonal relationships, serving to communicate emotion, improve social bonding, and reduce feelings of isolation. Our lab studies how people naturally communicate to one another via touch with the goal of creating technology that will allow people to communicate over long distances in our increasingly digital world. Humans use a variety of different gestures in social interactions, including squeezes, pats, and strokes. The system records physical touch patterns through an array of force sensors, processes the recordings using novel gesture-based algorithms to create actuator control signals, and generates mediated social touch through an array of voice coil actuators. Click here for more info.
Surface Modeling
Researchers: Michael Qian and Shihan Lu
Summary: Haptic rendering requires a model of the object or sensation you would like to display. Traditional haptic rendering algorithms use a physics-based model to generate the forces or vibrations to be displayed to the user as a function of their position and/or movement. In our research we take a data-driven approach of recording and modeling these signals using electromechanical analogues of our touch sensors, such as force sensors and accelerometers. Click here for more info.
Assistive Technology and Gait
Researcher: Catherine Yunis
Summary: Although walkers are often prescribed to help with stability, there are associations with falls while using them. A possible reason for walkers’ association with fall risk is the environmental perturbations created by the walker bumping into objects in the environment or rolling over cables or different terrains on the ground. By using a robotic walker that has been modified to provide environmental perturbations via force feedback we can perturb balance in a controlled laboratory setting. Click here for more info.
Open-Source Hardware
Researcher: Sandeep Kollannur
Summary: Click here for more info.
Touch-Based Drones
Researcher: Yang Chen
Summary: Click here for more info.
VR Surfing
Researcher: Premankur Banerjee
Summary: Click here for more info.
Fidgeting Devices
Researcher: Mahta Pourebadi
Summary: Click here for more info.