Improved control methods for vibrotactile rendering

Abstract

Many applications in the domain of haptics make use of vibrotactile rendering. One means for the delivery of the signals is employing voice coil actuators. However, existing control strategies for these exhibit limitations, for instance their dynamic characteristic is often not taken into account leading to output distortion. We propose two new control methods to improve vibrotactile rendering – once based on data-driven spline interpolation and once on following power spectral density. Both approaches rely on the idea of first decomposing a desired signal into a combination of harmonic components of different frequencies. For these, separate optimal gains are then employed to achieve a flat frequency response. The behavior of these controllers is examined in experiments and compared to a constant gain strategy. Both proposed methods result in improvements, such as lower spectral dissimilarity scores.