Direct control of a passive haptic device based on passive force manipulability ellipsoid analysis

Abstract

In displaying a virtual wall using a passive haptic device equipped with passive actuators such as electric brakes, unsmooth motion frequently occurs. This undesirable behavior is attributed to time delay due to slowness in the virtual environment update and force approximation due to the inability of a brake to generate torque in arbitrary directions. In this paper a new control scheme called direct control is proposed to achieve smooth display on the wall-following task with a passive haptic device. In direct control, brakes are controlled so that the normal component of a resultant force at the end-effector vanishes, based on the force analysis at the end-effector of the passive haptic device using the passive FME (Force Manipulability Ellipsoid). Various experiments have been conducted to verify the validity of the direct control scheme with a 2-link passive haptic system.