Haptic feedback improves manual excitation of a sprung mass

F. Huang, R.B. Gillespie, A. Kuo
2004 12th International Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems, 2004. HAPTICS '04. Proceedings.  
In this paper, we present an experiment in which human subjects were asked to manually excite a virtual sprung mass into resonance under various feedback conditions: visual, haptic or visual and haptic combined. We are interested in comparing the value of these feedback conditions in terms of their influence on the achievable performance in a dynamic task such as exciting a resonant mechanical system. From our human subject experiment (n=10), we found that with haptic feedback alone, subjects
more » ... ccessfully excited the sprung mass into resonance. For the particular case of ω n = 7 rad/s, subjects demonstrated significantly larger differences between the observed and expected frequency distribution under vision-only (paired t-test: p=0.034) and haptics-only feedback conditions (paired t-test: p=0.021), as compared to combined vision with haptic feedback. Variability of key marker locations of input behavior were also significantly lower with both feedback channels than with either alone (paired t-tests: p<.0002). Our results show that haptic feedback can augment vision to produce significant improvements in the control of a dynamic system.
doi:10.1109/haptic.2004.1287197 dblp:conf/haptics/HuangGK04 fatcat:nn2dvmsyrvg2zdwveoynaiflcq