Some basic issues in teletaction

Teletaction is the transmission of cutaneous information from a remote tactile sensor to an operator's skin, typically the finger tips. Ideally, one would like a realistic sensation of directly touching an object with one's own finger and sense properties such as local shape, hardness, or texture. Teletaction or tactile feedback is one component of haptic feedback, the other component being force or kinesthetic feedback. This paper considers design issues for teletaction systems, particularly sampling density, aliasing, and the limitations of using an array of 1 DOF actuators to approximate a continuous stress distribution on the human finger.