Robotics: Science and Systems II

Abstract

Teaching of sensorimotor skills is often considered one of the most promising applications of haptics.Surgical training and rehabilitation are just some of the areas where such training could have large impact.In many cases, the skill to be taught involves forces that have to be exerted along well defined motion trajectories.However, traditional haptics is not capable of displaying both these modalities simultaneously.This paper proposes a novel engineering analysis of haptic playback, a paradigm that allows to simultaneously display force and position data to a user.The analysis is based on treating the human operator as a multiple-input single-output (MISO) system, where the impact of the visual information through which the position data is displayed is explicitly modeled.An intuitive and simple model for the operator is proposed along with a preliminary validation through studies of human subjects.The model is then used to design a novel control strategy that achieves simultaneous display of force and position data.Subsequently, we present the control-theoretic analysis of the proposed approach and results of experiments with human subjects.