Actuators for Haptic and Tactile Stimulation Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Sensory substitution devices (SSDs) based on tactile sensation enhance human perception in applications such as assistive technologies. Over the last decade, the utilization of this technology in diverse applications such as robotic surgery, navigation on steering wheel, communication of emotion via internet, human–robot interaction and collaboration has attracted researchers’ attention. Intelligent algorithms have also been developed to enhance perception in SSDs. This has imposed certain challenges in hardware design for tactile actuators such as spatial/temporal resolution, power consumption and, most importantly, scalability and affordability of the suggested techniques.

This Special Issue will present most recent research activities relating to hardware modeling, developments, associated intelligent algorithms/firmware and tactile actuator tests. Common transduction mechanisms such as those that are electromagnetic, piezoelectric, electrotactile and pneumatic will be included, with an emphasis on tactile actuators and test procedures developed in the recent years. We wish to invite researchers from different disciplines to submit their most updated works regarding this topic, which will hopefully derive a holistic approach to improve the success rate in tactile perception with scalable and affordable solutions.

The scope of this Special Issue will focus on the following:

• Design and manufacturing of new tactile actuators;
• Modeling the skin–actuator interface;
• End-user experiences in augmented reality, robotic surgery and manipulation;
• Communication of emotion in cyber-media, automotive informatics, human–robot interaction/collaboration;
• Participatory test scenarios with an emphasis on end-user communities;
• Scalable and affordable engineering design of actuators.

Dr. Ali Mohammadi
Dr. Uriel Martinez-Hernandez
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Actuators is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• tactile actuators
• tactile perception
• transduction mechanisms
• tactile sensing
• robotics
• manipulation
• human–robot interaction/collaboration
• assistive devices
• autonomous systems
• machine learning