10 thoughts on “Steering By Touch And Haptic Feedback

      1. Exactly right, neo2121. And you couldn’t talk on the phone while driving either. For a significant number of people the car would never move. And can you imagine the potential havoc that would insue if the music or podcast you were listening to unintentionally controlled the vehicle. Or intentionally did like that Southpark episode did with Amazon’s Alexa.

  1. Interesting! This basically works like a backwards etch-a-sketch. Instead of turning knobs to move a nub, you move the nub to turn the knobs. That could make for an easy to recreate and interesting take on user input. You can skip the servos and use rotary encoders to get a cheaper non-haptic version of this. Now what could we use it for? Controlling a mouse or using it as a stylus/tablet seem obvious and probably more useful than anything to do with cars. Hmm.. if I can figure out a good use, maybe I’ll build one.

  2. This is a really cool input device. Reminds me of “flying faders” on audio mixing consoles, but this one works in two dimensions.

    Not so sure about the self driving car steering thing. It would be a very cool control for an fpv rc car though. An accelerometer in the car can provide the haptic feedback.

  3. Seems a very imprecise and slow way of inputting something that may need to be very fast and precise. Sure, for lane changes on a highway it’s fine, but imagine doing that to get on a side-street or go through a roundabout in town.

    1. It seems that the user interface is relying on the car already knowing what the surrounding features are, so it can give force feedback and draw a nice map of the road features.

      When the car is driving around uncharted neighborhoods, or in places where the roads don’t match the maps, it’s entirely clueless and the system doesn’t work.

  4. Lets see someone use this on a bumpy corugated Australian Dirt road where the drivable bit changes with the weather and where oncoming traffic is trying to use that same single track as you, with both vehicles doing 100kph.
    what a joke.

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.