UC Berkeley

This work reports an engineered platform for the non-contact haptic stimulation on human skins by means of an array of piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducer (pMUT) via the beamforming scheme. Compared to the state-of-art reports, three distinctive achievements have been demonstrated: (1) individual single pMUT unit based on lithium niobate (LN) with measured high SPL (sound pressure level) of 133 dB at 2 mm away; (2) a beamforming scheme simulated and experimentally proved to generate ∼2.3x higher pressure near the focal point; and (3) the combination of auto-positioning and haptic stimulations on volunteers with the smallest reported physical device size to achieve haptic sensations. As such, this work could have practical applications in the broad areas to stimulate haptic sensations, such as AR (Augmented Reality), VR (Virtual Reality), and robotics.