A haptic platform to enable fingertip grasping and manipulation

Haptic technologies allow human users to haptically interact with virtual environments. Haptics has been employed in many application domains including operator training, virtual exploration and teleoperation. Currently, most commercially available haptic devices focus on a single point of haptic interaction. While single-point haptics have been successfully employed in many applications, they remain limited to particular types of haptic interaction. Multi-point haptic devices are a logical progression and facilitate a far wider range of interactions including object grasping, multi-finger object manipulation and size discrimination. The ability to effectively achieve such interactions offers significant benefits for many applications including virtual training, telesurgery and telemanipulation. In such applications, the ability to use multi-point haptic interactions can provide far more effective user interaction as well improved perception of the virtual environment.