We introduce a novel haptic display designed to reproduce the sensation of both lateral and rotational slip on a user's fingertip. The device simulates three-degrees-of-freedom of slip by actuating four interleaved tactile belts on which the user's finger rests. We present the specifications for the device, the mechanical design considerations, and initial evaluation experiments. We conducted experiments on user discrimination of tangential lateral and rotational slip. Initial results from our preliminary experiments suggest the device design has potential to simulate both tangential lateral and rotational slip. Source files: https://github.com/Slip-Pad.

A critical problem in planning sampling paths for autonomous underwater vehicles is balancing obtaining an accurate scalar field estimation against efficiently utilizing the stored energy capacity of the sampling vehicle. Adaptive sampling approaches can only provide solutions when real-time and a priori environmental data is available. Through utilizing a cost-evaluation function to experimentally evaluate various sampling path strategies for a wide range of scalar fields and sampling densities, it is found that a systematic spiral sampling path strategy is optimal for high-variance scalar fields for all sampling densities and low-variance scalar fields when sampling is sparse. The random spiral sampling path strategy is found to be optimal for low-variance scalar fields when sampling is dense.