Towards an understanding of how humans perceive stiffness during bimanual exploration

Abstract: In this paper, an experimental testbed and associated psychophysical paradigm are presented for understanding how people discriminate torsional stiffness using wrist rotation about their forearm. Featured in the testbed are two 1-DoF rotary kinesthetic haptic devices. An adaptive staircase was used to evaluate JNDs for a stiffness discrimination task where participants explored virtual torsion springs by rotating their forearms. The JNDs were evaluated across seven different conditions, under four different exploration modes: bimanual, unimanual, bimanual feedback for unimanual displacement, and unimanual feedback for bimanual displacement. The discrimination results will inform future investigation into understanding how stiffness percepts vary.