Development of interfaces for haptic and thermo-haptic interaction with the human hand.

Thermoreceptors and Mechanoreceptors placed in the human skin allow people to easily interact with the surrounding environment. For example, a subject is able to manipulate objects in a dexterous way thanks to the feedback sent by the mechanoreceptors placed in his fingertips to his brain, whereas, thermoreceptors make possible the recognition of different material categories just by touching an object with one finger, furthermore thermoreceptors allow to determine the temperature of an object or a substance just by touching it. Thermo-haptic cutaneous cues combined with the kinaesthetic sense provide a subject with natural feelings when he interacts with objects in his everyday life. Recently, big progress in virtual-environments and teleoperation-environments have been performed, therefore, in order to allow the users to interact with virtual objects in a more natural way, many kinds of interfaces able to trigger the human senses in different modalities have been developed. These devices are able to provide the user with complex feedback in order to improve his sense of embodiment in the artificial environment. The aim of this Ph.D. thesis is to present the development of interfaces able to provide the user with force feedback, thermal feedback or both. The common objective of the developed devices is to provide the user with a feeling able to remind the natural one during the interaction with virtual objects. All the design issues, in relation with the kind of feedback the device is designed to provide the user with, will be taken into account and fully explained within the chapters, moreover, the results of the tests conducted on the realized prototypes are presented and accurately described for each device.