Design and Rapid Construction of a Cost-Effective Virtual Haptic Device

Over the past few decades, the rapid development of haptic technology has made it widely used in the fields of virtual reality, video games, rehabilitation, education, and manufacturing. This article presents a study on the rapid construction of a cost-effective virtual haptic device. In this connection, this article proposed a new design concept called the haptic environment. A whole haptic system is divided into an environment, which consists of all common modules, and a haptic robot. As such, a customized haptic robot can be plugged into the environment to form a haptic system. The environment also contains the adapters that facilitate the accommodation of the customized haptic robot into the environment. To show the effectiveness of this concept, a three-degree-of-freedom robot along with the environment was implemented in this article. Experiments were conducted to understand the performance of the prototype of the haptic system, as developed, and the results show that the developed haptic system has the graphical refresh frequency of about 60 Hz and the haptic rendering frequency of about 500 Hz, nearly three times faster than the Phantom Omni device commercially available. The contribution of the study reported in this article includes the demonstration of the feasibility of the rapid construction of a virtual haptic device and the provision of a cost-effective haptic device for applications in the robotic rehabilitation and human assistive systems.