Fabrication and Evaluation of Tactile Stimulator Using Stacked PZT

적층형 액추에이터를 이용한 촉각자극기의 제작 및 평가 PZT

A tactile stimulator array using stacked PZT is fabricated and evaluated in this paper. The purpose of this research is the development of a tactile stimulator to represent the obstacle information for the visually disabled. As a first step of this research, we investigate the physiological characteristics of tactile stimuli and design a tactile stimulator based on the investigated results. Also we evaluated a fabricated tactile stimulator. The prototype of tactile stimulator which has 2$\times$2 tactor elements with 3mm spacing is fabricated using stacked PZT actuator. In order to evaluate the characteristics of this tactile stimulator, physiological experiments are carried out. In the experiment, the threshold of tactile stimulus intensity within a frequency range of 5-500Hz at various stimulus amplitudes are investigated. According to the obtained experimental result, the input signal of tactile stimulator for the effective transfer of obstacle information is determined. Also physiological experiments of multi-stimuli recognition such as shift and rotation are carried out