Research and development of vision based tactile display system using shape memory alloys

In this paper, an innovative vision based tactile display system is presented. Using common web camera to get visual information, the developed system captures and recognizes the shape of an object by proposed method which combines basic algorithm of the active contour and Harris corner detection. In order to let people sense the shape of the captured object, the developed system transforms visual information of the shape to tactile sensation. To represent the obtained tactile sensation, a tactile display panel is designed with 25 compact pin-type actuators to provide stimulation sources by using shape memory alloys. By employing higher-level perception, the resolution of the designed tactile display panel increases more than three times. Therefore, the shape of the captured object can be represented accurately. For verifying the effectiveness of the developed vision based tactile display system, experimental results are shown.