The Biomechanics of the Tactile Perception of Friction

Humans rely on their sense of touch to perceive subtle movements and micro slippages to manipulate an impressive range of objects. This incredible dexterity relies on fast and unconscious adjustments of the grip force that holds an object strong enough to avoid a catastrophic fall yet gentle enough not to damage it.

The Biomechanics of the Tactile Perception of Friction covers how the complex mechanical interaction is perceived by the nervous system to quickly infer the state of the contact for a swift and precise regulation of the grip. The first part focuses on how humans assess friction at the contact initialization and the second part highlights an efficient coding strategy that the nervous system might use to continuously adjust the grip force to keep a constant safety margin before slippage.

Taken together, these results reveal how the perception of frictional information is encoded in the deformation of our skin. The findings are useful for designing bio-inspired tactile sensors for robotics or prosthetics and for improving haptic human-machine interactions.