On the Design of a Portable Force Illusion Device for Navigation Aids
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Navigation aids rely mostly on (audio)visual cues when it comes to communication with the user. An alternative and more intuitive communication modality may be provided by means of haptic guidance generated by a portable mechatronic device. Especially visually impaired and blind people may benefit from a device that generates the illusion of an external force; it may possibly eliminate the need for a guide dog. This paper investigates constant-velocity crank-driven mechanisms which are able to generate such a force illusion by means of a reciprocating mass. The focus of this paper is on the generation of the illusion itself rather than manipulating the direction of this force. The force illusion is a result of successive positive and negative reaction forces with unequal amplitude, generated by a reciprocating mass. The acceleration ratio of the mass is selected as the main evaluation criterion for comparing different types of candidate mechanisms. Because the input is a simple motor rotating at a constant velocity, the synthesis of the mechanism is key to generating proper acceleration profiles. A brute-force approach is used for the synthesis procedure, i.e., characteristic distances and link lengths are varied with steps of 1mm for each of the candidate mechanisms, thereby generating very large numbers of variants. Kinematic performance reveal typical acceleration ratios in the range of 1 to 19; where a ratio of one does not result in a force illusion while a ratio of 19 might be demanding on the physical design. An objective evaluation leads to selecting the Square Recti-Linear mechanism as the overall most promising candidate mechanism. A prototype of this mechanism is then presented to demonstrate the working principle. The shape of the prototype’s force profile over time is measured experimentally and is shown to be very similar to the profile obtained by simulation. The reciprocating mass accounts for almost one fifth of the total mass of the prototype, resulting in a strong force illusion in comparison with gravitational forces.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".