A Smart System to Standardize the Specifications of Haptic Quality Control

The specific attention paid to the quality perceived through the senses of costumers when touching a product has led to a rapid growth in the industrial interest for the field of haptics. Controlling the quality of products with such expectations has become a challenge for manufacturers, especially considering the current lack of a generic method to standardize control specifications and provide efficient control tools, whether a manual or automated control is considered. This study provides a new insight on the definition of control specifications regarding perceived quality control. Smart systems have proven useful and efficient in a number of other domains, but has never been applied in a generic manner to the control of the quality related to the sense of touch. Therefore, a system based on formalized knowledge on haptic perceptions and its relations with quality control is proposed. This paper presents the proposed approach for the standardization of haptic quality control specifications, along with an example of a manufacturing application. The structure of the proposed knowledge model is detailed, as well as the semantic approach that enabled the development of a formalized haptic sensation vocabulary. An experimental method was used to model the influence of exploration on perception, considering the application case.