On the Influence of Hand Dynamics on Motion Planning of Reaching Movements in Haptic Environments

The paper presents an analysis of human reaching movements in the manipulation of flexible objects. Two models, the minimum hand jerk and the minimum driving hand forcechange, are used for modelling and verification of experimental data. The data are collected with the haptic system supporting dynamic simulation of the flexible object in real time. We describe some initial experimental results and analyze the applicability of the models. It is found that even for short-term movements human motion planning strategy can depend on arm inertia and configuration. This conclusion is based on the experimental evidence of the multi-phased hand velocity profiles that can be well captured by the minimum driving hand force-change criterion. To support the latest observation, an experiment with reinforcement learning was conducted

Evaluating rules of interaction for object manipulation in cluttered virtual environments

A set of rules is presented for the design of interfaces that allow virtual objects to be manipulated in 3D virtual environments (VEs). The rules differ from other interaction techniques because they focus on the problems of manipulating objects in cluttered spaces rather than open spaces. Two experiments are described that were used to evaluate the effect of different interaction rules on participants' performance when they performed a task known as "the piano mover's problem." This task involved participants in moving a virtual human through parts of a virtual building while simultaneously manipulating a large virtual object that was held in the virtual human's hands, resembling the simulation of manual materials handling in a VE for ergonomic design. Throughout, participants viewed the VE on a large monitor, using an "over-the-shoulder" perspective. In the most cluttered VEs, the time that participants took to complete the task varied by up to 76% with different combinations of rules, thus indicating the need for flexible forms of interaction in such environments

Assisted Teleoperation in Changing Environments with a Mixture of Virtual Guides

Haptic guidance is a powerful technique to combine the strengths of humans and autonomous systems for teleoperation. The autonomous system can provide haptic cues to enable the operator to perform precise movements; the operator can interfere with the plan of the autonomous system leveraging his/her superior cognitive capabilities. However, providing haptic cues such that the individual strengths are not impaired is challenging because low forces provide little guidance, whereas strong forces can hinder the operator in realizing his/her plan. Based on variational inference, we learn a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) over trajectories to accomplish a given task. The learned GMM is used to construct a potential field which determines the haptic cues. The potential field smoothly changes during teleoperation based on our updated belief over the plans and their respective phases. Furthermore, new plans are learned online when the operator does not follow any of the proposed plans, or after changes in the environment. User studies confirm that our framework helps users perform teleoperation tasks more accurately than without haptic cues and, in some cases, faster. Moreover, we demonstrate the use of our framework to help a subject teleoperate a 7 DoF manipulator in a pick-and-place task.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figure

Putting the feel in ’look and feel‘

Haptic devices are now commercially available and thus touch has become a potentially realistic solution to a variety of interaction design challenges. We report on an investigation of the use of touch as a way of reducing visual overload in the conventional desktop. In a two-phase study, we investigated the use of the PHANToM haptic device as a means of interacting with a conventional graphical user interface. The first experiment compared the effects of four different haptic augmentations on usability in a simple targeting task. The second experiment involved a more ecologically-oriented searching and scrolling task. Results indicated that the haptic effects did not improve users performance in terms of task completion time. However, the number of errors made was significantly reduced. Subjective workload measures showed that participants perceived many aspects of workload as significantly less with haptics. The results are described and the implications for the use of haptics in user interface design are discussed

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion

Temporal perception of visual-haptic events in multimodal telepresence system

Book synopsis: Haptic interfaces are divided into two main categories: force feedback and tactile. Force feedback interfaces are used to explore and modify remote/virtual objects in three physical dimensions in applications including computer-aided design, computer-assisted surgery, and computer-aided assembly. Tactile interfaces deal with surface properties such as roughness, smoothness, and temperature. Haptic research is intrinsically multi-disciplinary, incorporating computer science/engineering, control, robotics, psychophysics, and human motor control. By extending the scope of research in haptics, advances can be achieved in existing applications such as computer-aided design (CAD), tele-surgery, rehabilitation, scientific visualization, robot-assisted surgery, authentication, and graphical user interfaces (GUI), to name a few. Advances in Haptics presents a number of recent contributions to the field of haptics. Authors from around the world present the results of their research on various issues in the field of haptics