Transtiff: A Stick Interface with Various Stiffness by Artificial Muscle Mechanism

We manipulate stick objects, such as chopsticks and pens in our daily life. The senses of the human hand are extremely sensitive and can acquire detailed information. By perceiving changes in the feel of the finger, we perceive the characteristic of the object when we manipulate sticks, such as pens and brushes. Therefore, we can extend the tactile experience of touching something by controlling a stick's grasping sensation. In this study, we propose Transtiff which has a joint that changes its stiffness dynamically to a stick object that generally cannot bend. We use a piston mechanism that uses a small motor to compress the liquid in a flexible tube to control the stiffness of the joint.