Search and rescue operations are often undertaken in low-visibility smoky environments in which rescue teams must rely on haptic feedback for navigation and exploration. The overall aim of our research is to enable a human being to explore such environments using a robot. In this paper we focus on creating feedback from a robot to a human. We describe our first designs and trials with vibration motors. The focus is on determining the potential use of vibration motors for message transfer and our trials reflect whether different messages can be discriminated. We describe the testing procedure and the results of our first tests. Based on these results, we conclude that close spatial arrangement of the motors blurs individual signals.
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