The field of haptics is concerned with the engineering and design of systems (including software and hardware components) that support interaction with computer applications via tactile (touch) feedback and control. Together with a visual display, haptics technology supports many training activities requiring hand-eye coordination, such as surgery, driving, and flying.

In this paper, the authors describe the design process for an encountered-type haptic display for multiple fingertip contacts that mimics the human behavior of grasping an object of any shape and size. The context is clearly robotics. The authors’ work is mainly a follow-up to Hoshino, Maeda, and Tachi’s work [1], but it is worth remembering that the first encountered-type device was proposed by McNeely [2] and Tachi et al. [3] independently.

The main contribution of this paper is the scientific methodology the authors use. Unlike many related works in the robotics community, the design work carried out by the authors is sustained by a careful observation of human grasping behavior, from which the authors develop a nearly complete specification, followed by the construction of a contact module prototype. For those interested in applying scientific method principles in engineering, this paper is worth reading.