As smart devices dominate larger areas of day-to-day life, their ability to communicate with human users must improve. While skin is the largest organ in the human body, relatively few efforts have gone toward developing more adaptive ways to utilize the "sense of touch" compared to visual and auditory signaling. The mechanical stimulus to generate a sense of touch by the embedded mechanoreceptors in the skin at different depths has been created in previous ways via vibratory actuators, requiring bulky and specialized offset masses and motors. In this project, we are investigating the creation of a haptic-capable human-machine interface (HMI) via ultrasonic pressure waves generated by piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducer (PMUT) arrays. An ultrasonically-induced sense of touch has the advantage of being generated by the same PMUT array that is used to detect complex mechanical inputs from a human user. To achieve this ultrasonic HMI, we are investigating the use of high-performance bimorph dual electrode AlN and KNN piezoelectric material devices.
Project currently funded by: Industry Sponsored Research