Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2402.11496

Point-Wise Vibration Pattern Production via a Sparse Actuator Array for Surface Tactile Feedback

Xiaosa Li·Runze Zhao·Chengyue Lu·Xiao Xiao·Wenbo Ding
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Surface vibration tactile feedback is capable of conveying various semantic information to humans via the handheld electronic devices, like smartphone, touch panel,and game controller. However, covering the whole device contacting surface with dense actuator arrangement can affect its normal use, how to produce desired vibration patterns at any contact point with only several sparse actuators deployed on the handled device surface remains a significant challenge. In this work, we develop a tactile feedback board with only five actuators in the size of a smartphone, and achieve the precise vibration pattern production that can focus at any desired position all over the board. Specifically, we investigate the vibration characteristics of single passive coil actuator, and construct its vibration pattern model at any position on the feedback board surface. Optimal phase and amplitude modulation, found with the simulated annealing algorithm, is employed with five actuators in a sparse array. And all actuators' vibration patterns are superimposed linearly to synthetically generate different onboard vibration energy distribution for tactile sensing. Experiments demonstrated that for point-wise vibration pattern production on our tactile board achieved an average level of about 0.9 in the Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) evaluation, when compared to the ideal single-point-focused target vibration pattern. The sparse actuator array can be easily embedded into usual handheld electronic devices, which shows a good significant implication for enriching their haptic interaction functionalities.

Explore related subjects

cs.RO

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Xiaosa Li, Runze Zhao, Chengyue Lu, Xiao Xiao, Wenbo Ding. 2024-02-18. Point-Wise Vibration Pattern Production via a Sparse Actuator Array for Surface Tactile Feedback. https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11496

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

IMLE-VLA: Fast Single-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Policies

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies leverage pretrained vision-language backbones to achieve strong cross-task generalization. A leading design couples this backbone with a dedicated continuous action head trained via diffusion or flow matching. However, such heads rely on iterative multi-step sampling, for example 10 Euler steps in $\pi_{0.5}$. This creates an inference bottleneck that produces stop-and-go movement in the robot and slower task completion. We introduce IMLE-VLA, which replaces the iterative action head with a single-step conditional generator trained via conditional Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (cIMLE). The cIMLE objective promotes multimodal action coverage, avoiding the mode collapse of naive regression heads while eliminating multi-step sampling entirely. When IMLE-VLA is applied to $\pi_{0.5}$, it increases inference frequency 3.67x (55 Hz vs. 15 Hz), enabling up to 11x higher action throughput. On the 40-task LIBERO benchmark, IMLE-VLA achieves the highest average success rate (98.0%) among all baselines while leading in inference frequency. Under the test-time perturbations of LIBERO-plus, IMLE-VLA retains $\pi_{0.5}$'s robustness while other baselines degrade sharply, confirming that the cIMLE head preserves generalization. Real-world experiments on a Franka Emika Panda across four tasks demonstrate smoother motion (2.2x to 3.0x lower jerk) and faster task completion, with IMLE-VLA outperforming $\pi_{0.5}$ on every task and reducing average VLA inference time per episode by 3.9x to 6.6x. Videos and code are available at https://kianhk6.github.io/IMLE-VLA/

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

ObstaDiff: Generalizable Diffusion Policy Learning via Obstacle-aware Representations

Imitation learning has achieved impressive results in robotic manipulation, yet most existing approaches assume clean backgrounds and lack explicit mechanisms for obstacle-aware motion generation. Extending such policies to cluttered, real-world scenes with unstructured obstacles remains a key generalization challenge. We present ObstaDiff, a decomposed diffusion-policy framework with a lightweight obstacle-aware visual encoder. ObstaDiff extracts a structured target-obstacle-background representation, enabling the downstream alignment policy to generate end-effector trajectories toward a target-centered bottleneck pose while reasoning about surrounding obstacles. We evaluate ObstaDiff on 61 real-robot greenhouse trials per method (366 executions in total). ObstaDiff achieves 75.41% average task success and 8.20% average obstacle collision rate, outperforming representative imitation-learning baselines and improving generalization in cluttered agricultural scenes.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Testing Between the Test Cases: Proving End-to-End Steering in Conditions You Never Drove

AI-based automated vehicle testing is challenging because a model that passes every test condition can still fail in the real world. Formal verification offers a way to directly address this gap. On a simulated highway and an arterial road we trained two small end-to-end steering networks each in CARLA, one on clear conditions alone and one on clear, fog, night and low sun. All four models were driven against a 2.19 ft lane-departure budget. Without driving again, we used bound propagation, a formal method that reads the trained weights, to compute how far steering can drift at every disturbance strength between two captured images. One calculation covers more than a campaign could drive: on the arterial it spans 133 poses, where ten intensities each would be 10^133 combinations, in minutes on one GPU. Not only did formal verification find conditions that broke the clear-trained policy without simulation testing, it provided some preliminary evidence for potential failures between the test cases. Our overall conclusion is that formal verification is a viable complement to simulation, and could be adopted as a part of verification and validation for automated driving.

cs.RO↗