Realistic Haptic Feedback for Virtual Environments and Teleoperation

Katherine Kuchenbecker
PhD Candidate
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Stanford University

Abstract
When contacting objects in your surroundings with your fingers or a handheld tool, you can feel a rich array of haptic cues that reveal each item's geometry and material properties. Haptic interfaces seek to extend the normal reach of the human hand by recreating the feel of real objects for interaction with simulated and remote environments. Though they show great promise for applications such as dental training and minimally invasive surgery, current haptic interfaces fail to provide realistic feedback to the user, limiting the usefulness and applicability of such systems. My primary research goal is to improve the authenticity of virtual and remote touch such that haptically portrayed objects feel indistinguishable from their real counterparts.

My work has addressed two main aspects of haptic feedback: the location of contact along the user's finger, and crisp impacts with hard surfaces. The inability of typical systems to display contact location makes feature localization difficult. The addition of a small tactile element that moves along the user's fingerpad adeptly portrays changing contact conditions and enables faster, more accurate exploration of an unknown environment. Traditional haptic interfaces also struggle to render hard objects, creating surfaces that feel as soft and undefined as foam. Matching the high-frequency accelerations of the user's hand to those experienced during a real interaction significantly improves the realism of both virtual and remote contact. Haptic feedback that compellingly imitates the feel of real interactions will effectively meet the needs of existing haptics applications and facilitate adoption in newly identified areas.

Biosketch
Katherine J. Kuchenbecker is a Ph.D. Candidate in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. Previously supported by NSF and ARCS fellowships, she is the first doctoral student of Professor Günter Niemeyer. As a member of the Telerobotics Lab, she researches strategies for improving haptic feedback in virtual and remote interactions. She completed a Master's degree in M.E. at Stanford in June of 2002, focusing on mechatronics, robotics, and design. She also did her undergraduate work in M.E. at Stanford, graduating as the Henry Ford scholar, the top engineering student in her class, in June of 2000.

Tuesday, February 14, 2006
11 AM, 337 Towne Bldg.