Vincent Hayward

About

Vincent Hayward is a pioneering researcher whose work spans haptics, tactile sensing, robotics, and human perception — fields he has shaped over four decades of influential scholarship. Beginning with foundational contributions to robot manipulator control in the mid-1980s, including the widely adopted RCCL library for Unix-based robot programming and early work on fast collision detection, Hayward established himself as a versatile engineer bridging software systems and physical robotics. His research evolved toward the science of touch, where he has made landmark contributions to understanding how humans perceive and interact with the world through tactile feedback. His investigations into cutaneous vibration propagation, haptic curvature discrimination, and the spatial encoding of texture have fundamentally advanced our understanding of the skin as a sensory organ. His 1996 paper on haptic interface performance measures remains a cornerstone reference in the field, while his more recent work on electronic skin — already garnering nearly 300 citations — addresses urgent challenges in robotics and prosthetics. Across perception, instrumentation, and artificial systems, Hayward's research consistently connects biological insight with engineering innovation, making him one of the most consequential figures in haptics research worldwide.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Large-Area Soft e-Skin: The Challenges Beyond Sensor Designs

   296 citations · 2019
2. 2
   Performance Measures for Haptic Interfaces

   197 citations · 1996
3. 3
   Spatial patterns of cutaneous vibration during whole-hand haptic interactions

   169 citations · 2016
4. 4
   Robot Manipulator Control under Unix RCCL: A Robot Control "C" Library

   145 citations · 1986
5. 5
   The Spatial Spectrum of Tangential Skin Displacement Can Encode Tactual Texture

   133 citations · 2011
6. 6
   Calibration of a parallel robot using multiple kinematic closed loops

   128 citations · 2002
7. 7
   Local Surface Orientation Dominates Haptic Curvature Discrimination

   107 citations · 2009
8. 8
   The Change in Fingertip Contact Area as a Novel Proprioceptive Cue

   73 citations · 2016
9. 9
   Fast collision detection scheme by recursive decomposition of a manipulator workspace

   70 citations · 1986
10. 10
    The auditory motionaftereffect: Its tuning and specificity in the spatial and frequency domains

    49 citations · 2000

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links