Jean-Marc Alexandre

VITAL: a new low-cost vibro-tactile display system

Tactile displays are deformable surfaces that simulate skin deformations that occur when interacting with real surfaces (relieves) by transmitting small-scale shape information and vibration to the fingertip. We present a new vibrotactile display system composed of a matrix of 8/spl times/8 tactile display, a control/power system (electrical hardware) and a software interface dedicated to translate and display a black and white picture on the 8/spl times/8 tactile display with different close-ups. The 8/spl times/8 tactile display is based on a new multi-layer concept. This concept allows developing a new generation of tactile matrices with a high density of micro actuators, a simple assembling process and at a quite competitive price.

Pose estimation from less than six non coplanar points

Pose estimation has many applications in robotics, such as robot localization using a vision sensor, or position-based visual servoing. In this paper, a simple but an efficient pose estimation method from minimal point pairs is given. The method we propose is based on exhaustive optimization of only two most critical parameters. It allows to solve the local minima problem. The both model based and free model pose estimation are treated. Finally, simulation results are given to validate the proposed method