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Humans rely on multimodal perception to form representations of the world. This implies that environmental stimuli must remain consistent and predictable throughout their journey to our sensory organs. When it comes to vision,…

Our sense of touch is essential and permeates in interactions involving natural explorations and affective communications. For instance, we routinely judge the ripeness of fruit at the grocery store, caress the arm of a spouse to offer…

Architected metamaterials like foams and lattices exhibit complex responses governed by microstructural instabilities, localization, and phase-transition-like phenomena. Their behavior is further affected by heterogeneities inherent in…

Haptics in virtual reality is the emerging dimension after audiovisual experiences. Researchers designed several handheld VR controllers to simulate haptic experiences in virtual reality environments. Some of these devices, equipped to…

Materials designed by nature commonly exhibit functional grading and laminated structures, particularly when intended for enhanced impact protection. Synthetic materials have also found success in exploiting this concept with fully dense…

Playing back vibrotactile signals through actuators is commonly used to simulate tactile feelings of virtual textured surfaces. However, there is often a small mismatch between the simulated tactile feelings and intended tactile feelings by…

Rendering stable hard surfaces is an important problem in haptics for many tasks, including training simulators for orthopedic surgery or dentistry. Current impedance devices cannot provide enough force and stiffness to render a wall, and…

Mechanical metamaterials are structures designed to exhibit an exotic response, such as topological soft modes at a surface. Here we explore single-material 3D prints of these topological structures by translating a ball-and-spring model…

Natural systems integrate the work of many sub-units (cells) toward a large-scale unified goal (morphological and behavioral), which can counteract the effects of unexpected experiences, damage, or simply changes in tasks demands. In this…

Two approaches to incorporate heterogeneity in discrete models are compared. In the first, standard approach, the heterogeneity is dictated by geometrical structure of the discrete system. In the second approach, the heterogeneity is…

Organisms in nature, such as Cephalopods and Pachyderms, exploit stiffness modulation to achieve amazing dexterity in the control of their appendages. In this paper, we explore the phenomenon of layer jamming, which is a popular stiffness…

Many surface cues support three-dimensional shape perception, but people can sometimes still see shape when these features are missing -- in extreme cases, even when an object is completely occluded, as when covered with a draped cloth. We…

We present a multi-phase design parameterization to obtain optimized heterogeneous lattice structures. The 3D domain is discretized into a cubical grid wherein each cube has eight distinct unit cell types or phases. When all phases are…

The primary interface of contact between a robotic or prosthetic hand and the external world is through the artificial skin. To make sense of that contact, tactile sensors are needed. These sensors are normally embedded in soft, synthetic…

Investigation of inhomogeneities has wide applications in different areas of mechanics including the study of composite materials. Here, we analytically study an arbitrarily-shaped isotropic inhomogeneity embedded in a finite-sized…

Authoring realistic haptic textures typically requires low-level parameter tuning and repeated trial-and-error, limiting speed, transparency, and creative reach. We present a language-driven authoring system that turns natural-language…

Tactile sensors are breaking into the field of robotics to provide direct information related to contact surfaces, including contact events, slip events and even texture identification. These events are especially important for robotic hand…

There is a growing need for soft robotic platforms that perform gentle, precise handling of a wide variety of objects. Existing surface-based manipulation systems, however, lack the compliance and tactile feedback needed for delicate…

Human tactile perception of materials relies on complex multisensory touch cues, yet the relationship between low-level tactile signals and perceptual representations remains poorly understood. This knowledge gap hinders the integration of…

Electrotactile feedback is a promising method for delivering haptic sensations, but challenges such as the naturalness of sensations hinder its adoption in commercial devices. In this study, we introduce a novel device that enables the…