LAUSR

It is possible that fingertip’s force tactile data measured with the same physical factors still present a statistically significant difference, which requires additional measurement of any new user’s data before using surface haptics devices to perform tactile display. A data prediction method is proposed to avoid the additional measurement procedure. It is based on the principal components analysis (PCA) and the Rao–Blackwell Ledoit–Wolf (RBLW) estimator. The former predicts any new user’s human biomechanical difference factors and fingertip’s force tactile data from trained principal components; the latter consistently estimates these principal components in the general asymptotic framework. The proposed method is evaluated with the lateral force data measured by the custom-designed device. The results show that the predicted lateral force presents reasonably small relative errors; in addition, the acquisition time has been extremely reduced when compared with force measurement devices.