Abstract: This paper presents a design and characteristics of a new developed five-fingered haptic interface robot named HIRO II. The haptic interface can presents force and tactile feeling at the five- fingertips of the human hand. It was designed to be completely safe and to be similar to the human upper limb both in shape and motion ability, ant its mechanism consists of a 6 DOF arm and a 15 DOF hand. The interface is placed opposite to the human hand, which brings safety and no oppressive feeling, but this leads to causes difficulty in controlling the haptic interface because it should follow the hand poses of the operator. A redundant force control method in which all the joints of the mechanism are force controlled simultaneously to present the virtual force is studied. The HIRO II is also used as the haptic interface for the future science encyclopedia to be able to present the force feeling, which was demonstrated in Expo 2005 Aichi. Experiments have been carried out to show the high potential of the multi-fingered haptic interface and the results are also presented
Abstract: Maintaining a stable haptic interaction with virtual environments, especially with physically-based deformable objects, has long been an active area of research. We address this issue by presenting a comprehensive haptic system architecture and virtual reality simulation, where a physically-based modeling using the Finite Element Method (FEM) combined with an “elementary displacement” approach has been implemented. This approach ensures the stability of haptic interaction with deformable objects and considers interaction with multipoints contacts. The Future Haptic Science Encyclopedia (FHSE) we developed to verify our proposal and demonstrate the new haptic interface HIRO II. We also present an objective and subjective evaluation of FHSE simulation.
Abstract: When a virtual object is grasped by human hand, the grasped and the slipped states should be both presented with reality. This paper presents a computational technique for calculating the static and dynamic friction force, in addition to friction moment applied to haptic rendering. The proposed technique is evaluated by using a five-fingered haptic interface named HIRO II combined with virtual realty simulation system.
Abstract: A cooperative shared haptic virtual environment (CSHVE), where the users can kinesthetically interact and simultaneously feel each other over the network, is beneficial for many distributed VR simulations. A little is known about the influences of the network delay on the quality of haptic sensation and the task performance in such environments. This paper has addressed these issues by conducting a subjective evaluation to the force feedback and the task performance in a tele-handshake cooperative shared haptic system for different delay setting. Also, four subjective measures to evaluate the quality of haptic in CSHVEs have been proposed. These measures are the feeling of force, the consistency between the haptic-visual feedback, the vibration, and the rebound in the haptic device. In addition, a detailed description of the haptic sensation for different time delays is also described. A network emulator was utilized to simulate the real network cloud. An objective evaluation of the force feedback and the performance showed that there was no effect of the delay on the force feedback. It had a negative impact on the task performance. In general, the quality of haptic deteriorated as the delay increased and vibration and rebound hampered the users for large time delay. The haptic-visual consistency was robust in the presented system even for large time delays. Nevertheless, the examined tele-handshake system was able to deliver a high quality of haptic sensation, good performance, and stability for large time delay over the network.
Abstract: The Haptic Cooperative Virtual Workspace (HCVW), where users can simultaneously manipulate and haptically feel the same object, is beneficial and in some cases indispensable for training a team of surgeons, or in application areas in telerobotics and entertainment. In this paper we propose an architecture for the haptic cooperative workspace where the participants can kinesthetically interact, feel and push each other simultaneously while moving in the simulation. This involves the ability to manipulate the same virtual object at the same time. A set of experiments carried out to investigate the haptic cooperative workspace is reported. A new approach to quantitatively evaluate the cooperative haptic system is proposed, which can be extended to evaluate haptic systems in general.
