Encountered‐type haptic display for large VR environment using per‐plane reachability maps

Abstract

We show a novel encountered-type haptic system, H-Wall, to enable haptic feedback using a manipulator of seven degrees of freedom suitable for simulating indoor virtual reality environments, which are characterized and confined by a set of vertical walls and revolving doors. At runtime, our system tracks hand motion using a red-green-blue depth sensor and locates its configuration. Then, the robotic manipulator plans a trajectory for the end effector, attached to a rectangular rigid board, to make contact with the hand to deliver a sense of touch as long as the perceived hand contact force is substantial. The force feedback is generated in a passive sense for static walls that the rigid board, corresponding to a vertical wall, holds its position as long as the perceived hand contact force is substantial. For a revolving door, the force feedback is generated in an active sense based on impedance control. In order to address the issue of limited workspace, we also propose a new reachability map, called per-plane reachability map, that is optimized to answer whether passive haptic feedback can be generated by a manipulator when the user touches a vertical wall at a given orientation. We successfully demonstrate our system to provide an illusion to the user in a virtual environment with touch sensation to the surrounding environment. KEYWORDS encountered-type haptic, haptic interaction, human-robot interaction, virtual realityComput Anim Virtual Worlds. 2018;29:e1814.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cav

Haptic PIVOT

“…These devices collide with fingers and display interaction forces only if a contact occurs in the virtual environment. Examples include TouchMover [16], H-Wall [12], RoomShift [18], Snake Charmer [2], and Haptic-go-round [33]. The haptic proxies mounted on these devices can have certain shape and size discrepancies from the virtual counterpart, as studied by Tinguy et al [21].…”

ZoomWalls

“…To create a highly accurate and rapid encounter type haptic system, Yokokohji et al [57] used a convex polyhedron surface for collision detection with the user's hand, and [58] uses an understanding of kinematics features (e.g., velocity profle) of reaching and grasping behaviours. Their later work [25] relies on constructing reachability maps for a robot that represents surfaces with a much smaller prop. Thus, there is a wide range of prediction approaches, but most are for achieving grounded in-situ haptic devices.…”

“…We model the user as a moving obstacle with a known velocity, so the ZoomWalls can move around one another and the user. Similar to [25], this path planning process is always running. When the Predictor notices something Session 3B: Haptics for Room-Scale VR UIST '20, October 20-23, 2020, Virtual Event, USA has changed in the system (e.g.…”

WeATaViX: WEarable Actuated TAngibles for VIrtual Reality eXperiences

“…Encounter-type haptic displays (ETHDs) solve the issue of rendering sensations of making and breaking contact, bringing their end-effector in contact with the user only when collisions with virtual objects occur [16]. Many types of grounded [7] and body-grounded ETHDs [10] exist. However, to the best of our knowledge, very few tackle the issue of grasping and manipulating objects.…”