Electromagnetic-Actuated Soft Tactile Device Using a Pull-Push Latch Structure

Tactile devices composed of tactile pixels enable dynamic formulation of surface morphological features. It, however, remains a challenge for soft tactile devices to reliably achieve low-power control of each tactile pixel while maintaining high spatial resolution. In this article, we proposed a novel pull-push latch structure and developed a programmable electromagnetic-actuated soft tactile device. Each tactile pixel of the device is individually controlled by a coil. The pull-push latch structure is capable of maintaining the pit depth of tactile pixels without energy consumption. By simultaneously controlling the current direction and on-off state of multiple coils, our tactile device with 3 mm spatial resolution can reliably form different tactile patterns. The energy consumption of a single coil is 59.15 mJ in a 6-s work cycle, which is about 0.34% of that of the tactile device without the latch structure. The user study indicates that the average discrimination accuracy of different patterns rendered by our tactile device is greater than 81%.