Haptic technology

About: Haptic technology is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 18818 publications have been published within this topic receiving 306713 citations. The topic is also known as: haptics & haptic media.

Review of surgical robotics user interface: what is the best way to control robotic surgery?

Abstract: As surgical robots begin to occupy a larger place in operating rooms around the world, continued innovation is necessary to improve our outcomes. A comprehensive review of current surgical robotic user interfaces was performed to describe the modern surgical platforms, identify the benefits, and address the issues of feedback and limitations of visualization. Most robots currently used in surgery employ a master/slave relationship, with the surgeon seated at a work-console, manipulating the master system and visualizing the operation on a video screen. Although enormous strides have been made to advance current technology to the point of clinical use, limitations still exist. A lack of haptic feedback to the surgeon and the inability of the surgeon to be stationed at the operating table are the most notable examples. The future of robotic surgery sees a marked increase in the visualization technologies used in the operating room, as well as in the robots’ abilities to convey haptic feedback to the surgeon. This will allow unparalleled sensation for the surgeon and almost eliminate inadvertent tissue contact and injury. A novel design for a user interface will allow the surgeon to have access to the patient bedside, remaining sterile throughout the procedure, employ a head-mounted three-dimensional visualization system, and allow the most intuitive master manipulation of the slave robot to date.

Redirected touching: Warping space to remap passive haptics

Abstract: There is an increasing interest in deployable virtual military training systems. Haptic feedback for these training systems can enable users to interact more naturally with the training environment, but is difficult to deploy. Passive haptic feedback is very compelling, but it is also inflexible. Changes made to virtual objects can require time-consuming changes to their physical passive-haptic counterparts. This poster explores the possibility of mapping many differently shaped virtual objects onto one physical object by warping virtual space and exploiting the dominance of the visual system. A first implementation that maps different virtual objects onto dynamically captured physical geometry is presented, and potential applications to deployable military trainers are discussed.

Measuring Neuromuscular Control Dynamics During Car Following With Continuous Haptic Feedback

Abstract: In previous research, a driver support system that uses continuous haptic feedback on the gas pedal to inform drivers of the separation to the lead vehicle was developed. Although haptic feedback has been previously shown to be beneficial, the influence of the underlying biomechanical properties of the driver on the effectiveness of haptic feedback is largely unknown. The goal of this paper is to experimentally determine the biomechanical properties of the ankle-foot complex (i.e., the admittance) while performing a car-following task, thereby separating driver responses to visual feedback from those to designed haptic feedback. An experiment was conducted in a simplified fixed-base driving simulator, where ten participants were instructed to follow a lead vehicle, with and without the support of haptic feedback. During the experiment, the lead vehicle velocity was perturbed, and small stochastic torque perturbations were applied to the pedal. Both perturbations were separated in the frequency domain to allow the simultaneous estimation of frequency response functions of both the car-following control behavior and the biomechanical admittance. For comparison to previous experiments, the admittance was also estimated during three classical motion control tasks (resist forces, relax, and give way to forces). The main experimental hypotheses were that, first, the haptic feedback would encourage drivers to adopt a “give way to force task,” resulting in larger admittance compared with other tasks and, second, drivers needed less control effort to realize the same car-following performance. Time- and frequency-domain analyses provided evidence for both hypotheses. The developed methodology allows quantification of the range of admittances that a limb can adopt during vehicle control or while performing a variety of motion control tasks. It thereby allows detailed computational driver modeling and provides valuable information on how to design and evaluate continuous haptic feedback systems.

Using the PhysX engine for physics‐based virtual surgery with force feedback

Abstract: Background The development of modern surgical simulators is highly challenging as they must support complex simulation environments. The demand for higher realism in such simulators has driven researchers to adopt physics-based models which are computationally very demanding. This poses a major problem since real time interactions must permit graphical updates of 30 Hz and a much higher rate of 1 kHz for force feedback (haptics). Recently several physics engines have been developed which offer multi-physics simulation capabilities including rigid and deformable bodies, cloth and fluids. While such physics engines provide unique opportunities for the development of surgical simulators, their higher latencies, compared to what is necessary for real time graphics and haptics, offer significant barriers to their use in interactive simulation environments.

Haptic discrimination of force direction and the influence of visual information

Abstract: Despite a wealth of literature on discrimination thresholds for displacement, force magnitude, stiffness, and viscosity, there is currently a lack of data on our ability to discriminate force directions. Such data are needed in designing haptic rendering algorithms where force direction, as well as force magnitude, are used to encode information such as surface topography. Given that haptic information is typically presented in addition to visual information in a data perceptualization system, it is also important to investigate the extent to which the congruency of visual information affects force-direction discrimination. In this article, the authors report an experiment on the discrimination threshold of force directions under the three display conditions of haptics alone (H), haptics plus congruent vision (HVcong), and haptics plus incongruent vision (HVincong). Average force-direction discrimination thresholds were found to be 18.4°, 25.6°, and 31.9° for the HVcong, H and HVincong conditions, respectively. The results show that the congruency of visual information significantly affected haptic discrimination of force directions, and that the force-direction discrimination thresholds did not seem to depend on the reference force direction. The implications of the results for designing haptic virtual environments, especially when the numbers of sensors and actuators in a haptic display do not match, are discussed.