A new coupling scheme for haptic rendering of rigid bodies interactions based on a haptic sub-world using a contact graph

Abstract

Interactions with virtual worlds using the sense of touch, called haptic rendering, have natural applications in many domains such as health or industry. For an accurate and realistic haptic feedback, the haptic device must receive orders at high frequencies, especially to render stiff contacts between rigid bodies. Therefore, it is today still challenging to provide consistent haptic feedback in complex virtual worlds. In this paper, we present a new coupling scheme for haptic display of contacts between rigid bodies, based on the generation of a sub-world around the haptic interaction. This sub-world allows the simulation of physical models at higher frequencies using a reduced quantity of data. We introduce the use of a graph to manage the contacts between the bodies. Our results show that our coupling scheme enables to increase the complexity of the virtual world without having perceptible loss in the haptic display quality. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.