High-Bandwidth Biomimetic Finger for Tactile-Transparent Remote Texture Sensing

Abstract

High-fidelity tactile feedback is essential for robotic teleoperation, enabling precise manipulation and critical decision-making. While biomimetic fingertip sensors can capture surface-texture features, how their design shapes the tactile transparency of rendered feedback remains poorly understood. This paper presents a biomimetic fingertip replicating the human finger's multilayer mechanical gradient and fingerprint morphology, with an embedded high-sensitivity inertial measurement unit capturing texture-induced vibrations for remote vibrotactile rendering. Three variants are compared with the human fingertip through temporal and spectral analyses and a user study spanning three perceptual dimensions, establishing a transmission chain from fingertip design through signal characteristics to tactile transparency. The multilayer mechanical gradient yields the clearest improvements in signal intensity and texture-feature representation, whereas a stiffer skin layer amplifies vibration intensity at the expense of feature representation. The perceptual dimensions draw on distinct signal attributes: roughness on energy scaling, granularity on spectral shape, and repetitivity on characteristic-peak representation. These findings offer design principles for application-specific fingertips in robotic teleoperation.