Small, Soft, Thin, Lightweight and Flexible Tactile Display Enabling to Provide Multiple Mechanical Stimuli

We propose a small, soft, thin, lightweight, and flexible tactile display consisting of just a single actuator that can provide multiple, mechanical tactile stimuli such as vibration and heating. Various other tactile displays require the usage of multiple actuators such as motors, voice coils, speakers, Peltier elements, and heaters. However, our proposed tactile display uses just one actuator, the Dielectric Elastomer Actuator (DEA), to output vibration and heating. By configuring a tactile display with a DEA, our proposed tactile display can become very small, soft, thin, lightweight, and flexible while being able to output multiple mechanical stimuli. We describe the design of the prototype, control method for the output vibration and heating, advantages and disadvantages of this concept, and discuss future applications.