DandelionTouch: High Fidelity Haptic Rendering of Soft Objects in VR by a Swarm of Drones

TL;DR

DandelionTouch introduces a drone swarm-based haptic display for high-fidelity, large-area tactile feedback in VR, enabling realistic soft object interaction without wearable devices.

Contribution

This work presents a novel drone swarm system for haptic rendering in VR, including control algorithms, impedance topologies, and user perception evaluation.

Findings

Star topology reduced positional error by 20.6%

Drones achieved 28% higher velocities with impedance control

Users recognized surface properties with up to 93% accuracy

Abstract

To achieve high fidelity haptic rendering of soft objects in a high mobility virtual environment, we propose a novel haptic display DandelionTouch. The tactile actuators are delivered to the fingertips of the user by a swarm of drones. Users of DandelionTouch are capable of experiencing tactile feedback in a large space that is not limited by the device's working area. Importantly, they will not experience muscle fatigue during long interactions with virtual objects. Hand tracking and swarm control algorithm allow guiding the swarm with hand motions and avoid collisions inside the formation. Several topologies of the impedance connection between swarm units were investigated in this research. The experiment, in which drones performed a point following task on a square trajectory in real-time, revealed that drones connected in a Star topology performed the trajectory with low mean positional error (RMSE decreased by 20.6% in comparison with other impedance topologies and by 40.9% in comparison with potential field-based swarm control). The achieved velocities of the drones in all formations with impedance behavior were 28% higher than for the swarm controlled with the potential field algorithm. Additionally, the perception of several vibrotactile patterns was evaluated in a user study with 7 participants. The study has shown that the proposed combination of temporal delay and frequency modulation allows users to successfully recognize the surface property and motion direction in VR simultaneously (mean recognition rate of 70%, maximum of 93%). DandelionTouch suggests a new type of haptic feedback in VR systems where no hand-held or wearable interface is required.