Haptic interaction refers to the form of interaction with a real or virtual environment based on the sense of touch. As the user experiences and interacts with an environment through a haptic system, the haptic system directly or indirectly alters the user's perception and motor control. Therefore, understanding the effects of the haptic system on the perception and motor control is important.
The purpose of this study is the development of a computational model of the human haptic sensory-motor system for quantitatively capturing the user performance in haptic manipulation tasks. The developed computational model, which we call the haptic e-model, will be an objective tool for evaluation of haptic systems with emphasis on human operator's sensory-motor performance. Specifically, the developed haptic e-model will be composed of a benchmark suite of representative haptic manipulation tasks, task performance measures, and models for human perception and motor control.
The haptic e-model will be used as a benchmark evaluation model by the research community to evaluate effectiveness and performance of haptic systems, components, and algorithms. It will also be a computational tool that can be easily integrated into the design cycle of haptic systems, and facilitate quantitative analysis of design choices throughout system development.
As part of the project, the investigators have developed models for human arm dynamics and the associated intra- and inter-subject variability when using stylus-based haptic interfaces. The investigators have also characterized the human performance in point-to-point reaching tasks using a stylus-based haptic interface in the physical, co-located/non-colocated , and rotated virtual environment visualization conditions allowing to better understand the effects of visio-haptic transformations on performance of haptic manipulation tasks. The models and techniques developed as part of the project have been applied in several application areas, ranging from robotic surgical systems to teleoperation systems, and virtual environment based surgical training simulators. The results of the project have applications in the broader human-machine interfacing research. Specifically, understanding and modeling of the variability of human musculoskeletal system dynamics and understanding of the effects of visio-haptic transformations on performance of haptic manipulation tasks are significant for development of effective virtual environment simulations and more general human-computer and human-machine interfaces. The broader societal impacts of the proposed research beyond the impacts to the haptics area will be through the application areas of haptics. The results of the proposed research will facilitate the development of next generation medical robotic systems for minimally invasive and image guided therapies with higher dexterity and higher fidelity force feedback, overcoming the basic performance limitations of the current generation systems that have limited their adoption into the clinical practice.
