I am currently trying to gather some data on characteristics of human tactile sensing limits (robotics essay) and i am having trouble.

Right now i have:

Spatial resolution 1mm (Loomis, 1980)

Sensing minimum threshold 0.055g for men and 0.019g for women on the tip of fingers (Weinstein, 1968)

Does anyone know if is there a research that says the resolution, maximum threshold etc? (Resolution is defined as the smallest change that can be detected by a sensor)

Regards

There has been lots of research in this area. Could you elaborate about the scope of your interest or be more specific about values you're looking for? Are you exclusively focused on mechanosensation in the human hand?

I would suggest looking into time-varying stimuli like changes in pressure and vibration. These are important in perceiving things like texture and are ultimately based in the type of parameter you seem to be looking for. One suggestion I can think of right now is that you take a look at "Detection of Vibration Transmitted through an Object Grasped in the Hand" by Brisben et al. 1999. I would guess that could add to your parameter set.

One reason you may be having trouble is that the value you're looking for may not be a single fixed value, but vary with other factors like behavior that can modulate sensory discrimination. It depends how in-depth you want to go with your essay, but I applaud the effort. There are reasons it's been a huge challenge in robotics to build a robotic hand that can recapitulate the sensorimotor dexterity of a human hand!

Probably the best suggestion I can offer is to find a comprehensive review article on Pubmed, and follow the citation trail to the original experimental work as necessary.

Edited August 28, 201510 yr by CPG