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Updated: May 26, 2026

Tactile Semiautomatic Passive-Finger Angle Stimulator (TSPAS)
Published on: July 30, 2020
Roughness encoding in human and biomimetic artificial touch: spatiotemporal frequency modulation and structural
Calogero Maria Oddo1, Lucia Beccai, Johan Wessberg
1The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Polo Sant'Anna Valdera, Pontedera, PI, Italy. oddoc@sssup.it
Abstract:
The influence of fingerprints and their curvature in tactile sensing performance is investigated by comparative analysis of different design parameters in a biomimetic artificial fingertip, having straight or curved fingerprints. The strength in the encoding of the principal spatial period of ridged tactile stimuli (gratings) is evaluated by indenting and sliding the surfaces at controlled normal contact force and tangential sliding velocity, as a function of fingertip rotation along the indentation axis. Curved fingerprints guaranteed higher directional isotropy than straight fingerprints in the encoding of the principal frequency resulting from the ratio between the sliding velocity and the spatial periodicity of the grating. In parallel, human microneurography experiments were performed and a selection of results is included in this work in order to support the significance of the biorobotic study with the artificial tactile system.
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