Stable haptic rendering for physics engines using inter-process communication and remote virtual coupling

Abstract

Availability of physics engines has significantly reduced the effort required to develop interactive applications concerning the simulation of physical world. However, it becomes a problem when kinesthetic feedback is needed in the applications since the incorporation of haptic rendering is non-trivial, where fast haptic data update is demanded for stable rendering. In the regard, a framework for integrating haptic rendering into physics simulation engines is proposed. It mediates the update-rate disparity between haptic rendering and physics simulation engine by means of inter-process communication and remote virtual coupling, which fully decouples haptic rendering from complex physical simulation. Experimental results demonstrate that this framework can guarantee fast haptic rendering at 1k Hz even the physical simulation system operates at very low update rate. The remote virtual coupling algorithm shows better performance than the interpolation based methods in terms of stability and robustness.