Artificial Intelligence White Papers

Haptic Interfaces

• Tags:
• artificial intelligence,
• hand,
• forces,
• environments

Overview Haptics is concerned with information acquisition and object manipulation through touch. Haptics is used as an umbrella term covering all aspects of manual exploration and manipulation by humans and machines, as well as interactions between the two, performed in real, virtual, or teleoperated environments. Haptic interfaces allow users to touch, feel, and manipulate objects simulated by virtual environments (VEs) and teleoperator systems (Salisbury & Srinivasan, 1992). The keyboard, mouse, and trackball are familiar, passive, haptic interfaces that sense a user’s hand movements. Although they apply forces on the user’s hand upon contact and consequently provide tactual sensation, the forces are not under program control. Active haptic interfaces, such as desktop robots and exoskeletal gloves with force feedback, are more sophisticated devices that have both sensors and actuators. In addition to transducing position and motion commands from the user, these devices can present controlled forces to the user, allowing him or her to feel virtual objects, as well as control them. This chapter focuses on such devices.

This is an exciting time for the field of haptics. Within approximately 10 years of significant research activity, commercial efforts have brought simple, active haptic interfaces into mass production. Research efforts on a range of more sophisticated devices have intensified. The success of these endeavors depends on finding application tasks where haptics adds significant value and, from a design viewpoint, on achieving an optimal balance between the human haptic ability to sense object properties, fidelity of the interface device in delivering the appropriate mechanical signals, and computational complexity in rendering the signals in real time. Accordingly, this chapter discusses the usefulness of haptic displays in virtual environments (Section 2), the human haptic system (Section 3), and current interface hardware (Section 4). Algorithms for est

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