English

Encountered-Type Haptic Display via Tracking Calibrated Robot

Robotics 2023-10-02 v1 Human-Computer Interaction

Abstract

In the past decades, a variety of haptic devices have been developed to facilitate high-fidelity human-computer interaction (HCI) in virtual reality (VR). In particular, passive haptic feedback can create a compelling sensation based on real objects spatially overlapping with their virtual counterparts. However, these approaches require pre-deployment efforts, hindering their democratizing use in practice. We propose the Tracking Calibrated Robot (TCR), a novel and general haptic approach to free developers from deployment efforts, which can be potentially deployed in any scenario. Specifically, we augment the VR with a collaborative robot that renders haptic contact in the real world while the user touches a virtual object in the virtual world. The distance between the user's finger and the robot end-effector is controlled over time. The distance starts to smoothly reduce to zero when the user intends to touch the virtual object. A mock user study tested users' perception of three virtual objects, and the result shows that TCR is effective in terms of conveying discriminative shape information.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.16768,
  title  = {Encountered-Type Haptic Display via Tracking Calibrated Robot},
  author = {Chenxi Xiao and Yuan Tian},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.16768},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:35:23.876Z