Sam Schorr

Contact Information

Samuel Schorr
Graduate Student
Mechanical Engineering Dept.
Stanford University

Collaborative Haptics in Robotics and Medicine (CHARM) Laboratory
424 Panama Mall, Bldg. 560
Stanford, CA 94305
sschorr@stanford.edu

Education

B.S. in Mechanical Engineering
University of Texas at Austin
May 2011

M.S. in Mechanical Engineering
Stanford University
June 2013

Research

Robotics, Haptics, Teleoperation, Mechatronics

Skin Stretch Feedback for Teleoperation Systems

Skin Stretch Feedback For Sensory Substitution
Despite improving user task performance in some teleoperated tasks, haptic feedback is not incorporated in clinical surgical robotic systems due to stability and safety concerns. Researchers have attempted to convey this force information through other sensory channels in a technique called Sensory Substitution. During everyday manipulation tasks, skin stretch feedback is present and contributes to your perception of interaction forces. We hypothesize that skin stretch feedback could be a more intuitive feedback modality to replace force feedback when compared with other current sensory substitution methods such as vision and audio feedback. Through a series of psychophysical experiments, we characterize users' ability to discriminate between surfaces of different stiffness using skin stretch feedback and compare their performance against that obtained using force feedback.

Skin Stretch Feedback For Sensory Augmentation
It is hypothesized that by imposing artificial skin stretch cues, we can increase the perception of stiffness perceived by a user. Such a sensory augmentation scheme will prove useful in situations in which force feedback is hard or impossible to achieve, including surgical teleoperation in which force feedback gain has to be tuned low in order to achieve stability and safety. Other situations call for higher forces to be rendered than actuators are capable of achieving. In these scenarios, skin stretch feedback could help increase the range of applications of under-powered actuators.

Publications

Conference Proceedings

  1. Z.F. Quek, S.B. Schorr, I. Nisky, A. M. Okamura, and W. R. Provancher, "Sensory Substitution using 3-Degree-of-Freedom Tangential and Normal Skin Deformation Feedback", IEEE Haptics Symposium, in print, 2014.
  2. Z.F. Quek, S.B. Schorr, I. Nisky, A. M. Okamura, and W. R. Provancher, "Sensory Augmentation of Stiffness using Fingerpad Skin Stretch", IEEE World Haptics, pp. 467-472, 2013.
  3. S.B. Schorr, Z.F. Quek, I. Nisky, W.R. Provancher, A.M. Okamura, "Sensory Substitution via Cutaneous Skin Stretch Feedback", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 2333-2338, 2013.