Robot Algorithms for Haptic Interaction
Principal Investigator: Ming Lin
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation
Agency Number: IIS-9821067
Abstract
Intelligent systems and simulated environments require intuitive interfaces for man-machine interaction. These may include visual, auditory, and haptic interfaces. Compared to the presentation of visual and auditory information, methods for haptic display have not been sufficiently developed. Many researchers have observed that haptic rendering as an augmentation to visual display can improve perception and understanding of the world models and force fields in the synthetic environments.
In order to create a sense of touch between the user's hand and a virtual object, contact or restoring forces are generated to prevent penetration into the virtual model. This is computed by first detecting collision, determining the surface contact points and finding the penetration depth for calculating the restoring forces. To exploit the possibility of haptic interaction for performing assembly or dis-assembly tasks in an electronic prototyping environment, it is imperative that we develop the necessary real-timealgorithms and software systems, in addition to the force-feedback devices. Wepropose to investigate the following research issues:
- Real-time collision detection and contact determination for non-linear models and deformable bodies.
- Fast penetration depth computation between general three-dimensional geometric models.
- Integration with force-feedback devices for haptic interaction with virtual prototyping environments in design verification.
We will address these problems by:
- Investigating the use of hybrid hierarchical representations, dynamic data structures and multi-resolution modeling techniques.
- Theoretical analysis and efficient practical algorithms for penetration depth computation.
- Exploring issues related to robustness and numerical inaccuracies in implementations of these algorithms.
- Tailoring and optimizing the proposed algorithms for haptic interaction with reduced complexity philosophy.
Besides haptic interaction, the resulting algorithms and systems will also be useful for robot motion planning and dynamic simulation.