Haptic RADAR: Electronic whiskers

posted Sep 18th 2007 8:57pm by Will O'Brien
filed under: misc hacks

[thomph-zhu] sent in this interesting project. If you’ve ever wished for cat like senses, you’ll dig this. It’s a set of electronic whiskers – it uses IR to detect nearby objects, and vibrates against your head upon detection. It’s definitely an interesting use of tactile feedback. The initial idea is for construction safety, but this could be useful for plenty of other applications. (Robotic control, etc)

Read

Comments [21]

tagged: cat, electronic, force feedback, ForceFeedback, tactile, whiskers

Reader Comments

my haptic senses are tingling!

Posted at 11:00 pm on Sep 18th, 2007 by deathwombat

That’s pretty cool. Almost reminds me of some Solid Snake shit.

Posted at 12:53 am on Sep 19th, 2007 by Crash

wow more gear for weirdos.

Posted at 1:11 am on Sep 19th, 2007 by Thats Killer

i am super clumsy… this looks perfect!

Posted at 1:36 am on Sep 19th, 2007 by maxx

partial pure for blindness anyone?

Posted at 2:54 am on Sep 19th, 2007 by Scott

If they can increace this thing’s range, it’s gonna be saving lifes some day! :D

Posted at 6:45 am on Sep 19th, 2007 by SU-w/reb_w/root

That’s pretty dang cool. I used to do Aikido with a couple blind ladies. They got to be pretty good at sensing things, but with this they would have been kicking my butt all over the dojo. (Well, as far as butt kicking goes in Aikido.)

Posted at 7:27 am on Sep 19th, 2007 by Rahn

If we were to advance this a little… replace the whiskers with laser range finders, and replace the vibrators with a direct connection to the nervous system. Can’t get much closer than that to a “spider-sense.”

Also, this would make the “I’m not touching you” game kids like to play a whole lot more annoying….

Posted at 7:51 am on Sep 19th, 2007 by Smith Wesson

I agree with the blindness comment, this would be great, especially for people who have recently become blind. I’m in the military and I think the idea of useing this as a “eyes in the back of your head” would be great. It looks pretty inexpensive so I don’t think the uses for it will be limited in any way really, as to how and where it can be used. The only way I think it could be better is if the helmet was more of a hard shell and you could just have a servo push against your head harder and harder until something was actualy touching you, so you would feel it before it felt you kinda.

Posted at 8:01 am on Sep 19th, 2007 by razor386

dude, this could keep people from getting punched in the back of the head in high school! those kids who get picked on might be able to do something about it

Posted at 8:27 am on Sep 19th, 2007 by lonasindi

This is pretty cool, but I think as #7 said, if this was hooked up to the nervous system it would be more useful…
I’m thinking of an old hack involving a grid of electrodes stuck on a persons tongue attached to a camera. Maybe this would be a good alternative to vibrations considering how sensitive one’s tongue is.

Posted at 9:47 am on Sep 19th, 2007 by Sky

It’s already been said, but the first thing I thought when reading this was “Spider Sense”. The problem with something like this having a larger range would be everything in your immediate environment triggering it.

Posted at 9:54 am on Sep 19th, 2007 by Brad

I’m kinda bummed that they didn’t post building instructions for this device…I’d love to take a crack at making this myself

Posted at 2:24 pm on Sep 19th, 2007 by slightlyesq

I have a feeling that this little hack is the beginning of something a lot bigger.

Posted at 7:09 pm on Sep 19th, 2007 by DV82XL

I have been thinking about how to construct this type of thing for quite some time, but my very limited knowledge of microcontrollers has completely stopped me.

Now, I am thinking of using Ultrasound and the Arduino board (http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/UltrasoundSensor) to do something similar to what these dudes have done. Only, the ultrasound sensors featured on the page I linked to has a range of 3 meters.. Would be a cool hack! Always wanted a “sixth sense” but thus far, neither watching Naruto, Hunter X Hunter or Star Wars has yielded any results. =(

Posted at 2:20 am on Sep 20th, 2007 by Kim Helberg aka PlastBox

This is just plain awesome. I want one. Bad.

Posted at 4:56 pm on Sep 20th, 2007 by Dev

16: As a matter of fact, making an extremely rudimentary sixth sense is not hard at all! Do you know what a photoresistor is? It’s an electronics component that changes resistance depending on how much light that hits it.

Now, get a 9V battery, wire one terminal to your tounge, the other to one of the photoresistors legs, then wire the photoresistors other leg to your tounge.

Voltage will be applied across your tounge, how much depending on how much light hits the photoresistor. Cover it so no light hits it and you feel pretty much nothing. Expose it to light, and you will feel it even how strong the source of light is!

Nothing huge, just the simplest experiment of this kind I have been able to come up with. =P

Posted at 5:49 am on Sep 21st, 2007 by Kim Helberg aka PlastBox

This would be pretty good, cause just today i hit my head. I hit it pretty hard cause it was bleeding a little, thank god only a little. Well nice contraption.

——
Excuse my english, im from estonia.

Posted at 2:28 pm on Sep 21st, 2007 by jaxx

sweet; if u cam get it to work off of a ”n” batt. it can be small :)

Posted at 4:36 pm on Sep 24th, 2007 by hackarmy

coooooooooooool!! if u cold get to work off a”n” bat u can make it small :)

Posted at 4:42 pm on Sep 24th, 2007 by hackarmy

Oh! but Is it the think that you know earlier??

Posted at 6:39 am on Sep 27th, 2007 by Allison

Haptic RADAR: Electronic whiskers

Recent Posts

Reader Comments

Leave a Reply

Hacks

Resources

RSS newsfeeds

Most commented on (30 days)

Recent comments