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  Welcome
to the Laboratory for Human and Machine Haptics, less formally known as
the Touch Lab, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Touch
Lab was founded by Dr. Mandayam A. Srinivasan in 1990. We are an interdisciplinary
group of researchers interested in haptics -- the study of sensing and
manipulation through touch. We use a variety of methods to look for the
general principles that humans and machines use to explore, represent,
and interact with objects. The goals of our research are to understand
human haptics, develop machine haptics, and enhance human-machine interactions
in virtual reality and teleoperator systems. To gain a deeper understanding
of human haptics, multidisciplinary investigations involving skin biomechanics,
neurophysiology, psychophysics, motor control, and computational models
are employed. Typical projects involve the measurement of human capabilities
in specified manual tasks employing computer-controlled electromechanical
devices, and the determination of the biomechanical, neural and perceptual
mechanisms that underlie performance in these tasks. To develop haptic
machines that enable the user to touch and feel virtual reality, electromechanical
devices and rendering software are designed, and studies on the human
perception of computer-generated virtual objects under purely haptic and
multisensory conditions are conducted. The results of this research are
also beneficial to hand therapy, intelligent prosthesis design, and the
development of autonomous robots that need to perform human-like functions
in unstructured environments.
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