On Friday, March 15, 2019, Bruno ALBERT, a doctoral student in Engineering Sciences at theSystems and Materials for Mechatronics(SYMME) laboratory ofthe Doctoral School of Sciences and Engineering of Systems, Environment, and Organizations (ED SISEO), will defend his thesis entitled "Controlling the haptic quality of products – Formalization of haptic control and proposal for an implementation methodology."
The defense will take place at 10 a.m. in room B014 at the SYMME laboratory on the Annecy campus.
Thesis summary
The work carried out during this thesis led to the proposal of a methodological and software solution to help manufacturers better control the haptic sensory control of their products. This type of control, which dynamically uses the sense of touch, poses many problems in industry. A case study conducted on luxury watch straps illustrates the difficulty of objectively and repeatedly assessing the haptic quality of products. Our analysis of the literature also confirms that implementing this control requires a high level of expertise that must be acquired and capitalized upon. In particular, the way in which a haptic sensation is described and the way in which the product is controlled generally have a significant impact on the control result.
In order to reduce these difficulties, three main contributions are made. First, a method is proposed to formalize the elementary haptic sensations that give rise to sensory perception. This is a semantic modeling process that leads to the identification of a small number of elementary haptic sensations and their correlation with the words used in this field. Next, an ontological representation is constructed, based on existing models, to robustly structure all the knowledge necessary for haptic control (descriptors, sensations, anomalies, stimuli, sensory receptors, effectors, modes of exploration, etc.). This modeling enables contextualized access to this knowledge and its enrichment over time. Finally, we propose a methodology to assist in the systematic implementation of haptic control of products. It draws on modeled knowledge to generate a control standard tailored to the specific problem encountered. This standard includes formalized specifications of the haptic anomalies to be controlled, protocols, and a control reference system to be used. The INSENSO software tool, developed by INEVA, integrates this control implementation methodology and the associated knowledge management system.
Applying this methodology to watch straps led to the development of a haptic control standard within the manufacturing company. Using this standard significantly reduced the variability of control results. The solutions developed for haptic control open up many possibilities in the broader field of sensory control, particularly with regard to instrumentation.