Tactile display with rigid coupling based on soft actuator

The tactile display is a device which physically stimulates the human skin to reproduce the feel of touch. This paper presents a novel tactile display device driven by a dielectric elastomer actuator. The device adopts an indirect actuation method by using a rigid coupling, which aims to avoid direct contact of the human skin with the actuator. The rigid coupling is made of silicone to transmit the movement of the actuator to the touch layer located on the top surface of the coupling and provides the feeling of softness on contact. The device produces displacement about 350–140 μm at 0.3–10 Hz, which meets frequency requirements for simulating the Merkel cells as well as Meissner corpuscle. The force to simulate the fingertips can be exerted over 44 mN. This work describes its design, analysis and fabrication method in details with its experimental evaluations.