Handheld Haptic Grip Integrating Vibrotactile and Robotic-Touch Interfaces for Turn-By-Turn Pedestrian Navigation

This paper presents a novel handheld grip-shaped haptic device that effectively integrates vibrotactile and robotic- touch interfaces for turn-by-turn navigation. Inspired by our common expressions used daily for directions like “turn right at the third corner,” our system leverages vibration counts to indicate “how many corners ahead” and the direction change of a servo motor’s horn (robotic-touch) to show “which way to turn.” This approach provides a clearer and more situated instruction than existing systems that give only directions and/or subjective distances to the destination or those that just present the entire route all at once. A systematic user study with 13 participants demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed device over existing solutions that use either vibration or robotic-touch modalities alone. Specifically, our device allows users to navigate the multi-intersection environment signifi- cantly faster than the robotic-touch-only baseline. Subjective evaluations obtained from questionnaires further indicate that our device enhances “intuitiveness” and “efficiency” over the vibration-only system, and improves “reliability” and “safety” compared with the touch-only system.