COMPARING ACTIVE AND PASSIVE HAPTIC DISPLAYS WITHPSYCHOPHYSICS EXPERIMENTS

摘要

An active, two d.o.f. haptic display is used in psychophysicsrnexperiments to measure humans' ability to discriminate virtual surfaces ofrndiffering stiffness. In the first set of experiments, the subjects are presented withrnsurfaces that exhibit "normal" stiff behavior, i.e., when the subject deforms thernsurface, the energy is "stored" and can force the tip back out of the surface. In thernsecond set of experiments, the subjects are presented with the same surfaces (samernnominal stiffness), but the restoring forces associated with an elastic deformationrnare disallowed (in an effort to emulate the capabilities of a passive device). Thernresults indicate that the subjects discriminate stiffness equally well for the two testrnconditions.