Towards an understanding of how humans perceive stiffness during bimanual exploration

TL;DR

This study investigates how humans perceive torsional stiffness during bimanual exploration using a novel experimental setup with kinesthetic devices, revealing insights into sensory discrimination across various exploration modes.

Contribution

Introduces an experimental testbed and psychophysical paradigm for studying stiffness perception during bimanual wrist exploration, with diverse exploration modes and adaptive testing.

Findings

JNDs vary across exploration modes

Bimanual and unimanual conditions show different discrimination thresholds

Results inform future research on stiffness perception mechanisms

Abstract

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.