Stable Haptic Display Based on Coupling Impedance for Internal and External Forces

This paper discusses haptic display for grasping a virtual object by two fingers. Much research has been done on fundamental analysis for stability of haptic display. But it is difficult to apply the results immediately to grasping situations by two fingers, since the studies usually deal with a single device and a single object and the fingertip force in grasping situations has two components, internal and external components. The conventional methods, which specify the coupling impedance at each contact point separately, have no other alternative but to specify the impedance for the sum of the internal and external components. So even if only the impedance for the external force should be changed, the impedance for the internal force is also changed at the same time. In this paper, a new method, in which the coupling impedance is specified separately for the internal and external forces, is proposed and the stability of the proposed method is discussed using passivity analysis for 1 -DOF(Degree-Of-Freedom) system. Finally, some experiments are performed to study the effects of the proposed method.