Masters Applied Projects

Project 18

Investigation of Tactile and Proprioceptive Components for Object Manipulation and Perception

Student: Jacob Perrine

Mentors: Dr. Marco Santello – SBHSE
Dr. Stephen Helms Tillery – SBHSE
Dr. Simone Toma – SBHSE

YouTube Link: View the video link below before joining the zoom meeting

Zoom link: https://asu.zoom.us/j/84370800515

Time: 10am – 2pm

Abstract

Tactile and proprioceptive sensory feedback are the two sensory modalities that make up haptic sensation. The degree which these two sensory modalities are integrated together is not very well known. To investigate this issue a set of experiments were set into motion separating these sensory modalities and testing what happens when a person’s proprioceptive system is perturbed. A virtual reality system with haptic feedback along with a weighted object were utilized in a reach, grasp, and lift task. The subjects would lift two objects sequentially and try to judge which one was heavier. This project was split into three different experiments to measure the subject’s perception in different situations. The first experiment utilized the virtual reality system to measure the perception when the subject only has proprioceptive inputs. The second experiment would include the virtual reality system and the weighted object to act as a comparison to the first experiment with the additional tactile input. The third experiment would then add perturbations to the proprioceptive inputs through the virtual reality system to investigate how perception will change. Results from experiment 1 and experiment 2 will be compared to determine how much of a difference adding tactile feedback through the force sensor will make to the subject’s perceptual guesses. Results from experiment 3 will be investigated to see how much perturbing a subject’s proprioceptive inputs will cause their perceptual judgements to shift.