Vibrotactile Glove guidance for semi-autonomous wheelchair operations

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a novel tactile display, the Vibrotactile Glove, which provides a wheelchair user who has severe visual impairment with vibration (vibrotactile) signals to operate a powered wheelchair. The vibrotactile signals are conducted to the user's skin through a 3-by-3 array of vibrating elements (also known as vibrotactor). The vibrotactor array is placed on the back side of the Vibrotactile Glove. We designed a motor array controller which generates sequences of aligned stimuli indicating directional guidance (vertical, horizontal, and diagonal) and points of stimuli indicating the orientation and distance of obstacles. The haptic sensitivity of stimuli localization is reinforced by signal repetition with short inter-stimuli period. The preliminary results reveal the positive potential of the Vibrotactile Glove as an effective and robust tactile display that can convey essential information of wheelchair operation to a user with severe visual impairment.