Six Degrees of Freedom Implicit Haptic Rendering

Abstract

This paper introduces a six degrees of freedom haptic rendering scheme based on an implicit support plane mapping representation of the object geometries. The proposed scheme enables, under specific assumptions, the analytical reconstruction of the rigid 3D object’s surface, using the equations of the support planes and their respective distance map. As a direct consequence, the problem of calculating the force feedback can be analytically solved using only information about the 3D object’s spatial transformation and position of the haptic probe. Several haptic effects are derived by the proposed mesh-free haptic rendering formulation. Experimental evaluation and computational complexity analysis demonstrates that the proposed approach can reduce significantly the computational cost when compared to existing methods.