Haptic dancing: Human performance at haptic decoding with a vocabulary

Sommer Gentry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Photo of Sommer Gentry

The inspiration for this study is the observation that swing dancing involves coordination of actions between two humans that can be accomplished by pure haptic signaling. This study implements a leader-follower dance to be executed between a human and a PHANToM haptic robotic device. The data demonstrate that the participants’ understanding of the motion as a random sequence of known moves informs their following, making this type of interaction fundamentally different from closed-loop pursuit tracking.

Abstract Author(s): Sommer Gentry, Roderick Murray-Smith, and Eric Feron