Stable haptic interaction with virtual environments

TLDR

Haptic interaction suffers from fundamental stability and performance challenges. The study seeks to resolve these stability and performance issues in haptic interaction. The authors extend the virtual coupling network to include impedance and admittance models and apply linear circuit theory to derive necessary and sufficient stability conditions for passive human operators and virtual environments. A benchmark example demonstrates a duality between impedance and admittance cases, and the resulting equations yield an explicit design procedure for virtual coupling networks that maximize performance while guaranteeing stability, thereby decoupling haptic display control from virtual environment design and eliminating mechanical stability concerns.

Abstract

This paper addresses fundamental stability and performance issues associated with haptic interaction. It generalizes and extends the concept of a virtual coupling network, an artificial link between the haptic display and a virtual world, to include both the impedance and admittance models of haptic interaction. A benchmark example exposes an important duality between these two cases. Linear circuit theory is used to develop necessary and sufficient conditions for the stability of a haptic simulation, assuming the human operator and virtual environment are passive. These equations lead to an explicit design procedure for virtual coupling networks which give maximum performance while guaranteeing stability. By decoupling the haptic display control problem from the design of virtual environments, the use of a virtual coupling network frees the developer of haptic-enabled virtual reality models from issues of mechanical stability.