The influence of different haptic environments on time delay discrimination in force feedback

Abstract

Time delay in haptic telepresence arising from compression or communication alters the phase characteristics of the environment impedance. This paper describes how well a human operator can discriminate these changes in haptic environments. Three different environments are rendered on a haptic interface and manually excited by a human operator using sinusoidal movements. We find that time delay in haptic feedback can be discriminated starting from 15 ms in a pure damper environment, 36 ms in a spring system, and 72 ms when moving a damped inertia. We conclude that the discrimination thresholds increase with the absolute phase between velocity and force signals resulting from the remote environment characteristics. These results may benefit the human-centered design of high-fidelity haptic communication protocols and haptic filters. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.