Inertial Force Display Using Pneumatics for Whole Body Haptic Interface

摘要

Our goal is to develop environments that provide sensory input of sufficient fidelity which not only users intuitively feel they are inside a virtual world, but also are able to navigate and perform tasks with comparable skill that they display in the real world. In this paper design specifications for a new locomotion interface for rise-and-fall motion with inertial force displays are demonstrated. The locomotion interface has a seesaw mechanism for displaying vertical inertial forces and a pedaling device for supporting user mobility activities. The vertical axis of the mechanical seesaw is actuated by a pneumatic servo cylinder and can rise up and down on the user. The seesaw attached to the user can create vertically positive and negative forces that rise up and down the user creating an illusion of acceleration forces. The presence of the active seesaw mechanism allows several aspects of the locomotion to be rendered inertial forces. The head-mounted display also creates realistic environments for the rise-and fall motion. The verification of the developed system performance and design parameters such as a scale factor of the acceleration force and the phase relation between the body motion and displayed force are experimentally investigated. It is experimentally verified that the user can feel walking up the stairs through the physical immersive whole body haptic interface with the inertial force display.