Extracting relational constraints among objects with haptic vision in support of automatic construction of a virtual space simulator

Abstract

AbstractThe virtual reality technique has been widely applied to various problems, as a human interface technique emphasizing vision. Recently, practical use of tactile/force feedback device realizing the haptic (tactile) interface has been considered, recognizing the importance of tactile sensation. Consequently, the authors have proposed a “touch and see” haptic vision/active vision‐tactile idea, aiming at the automatic construction of a virtual space simulator faithful to the real world from the observed image, by using the haptic interface [6–8]. Aiming at the automatic construction of the virtual object manipulation simulator faithful to the real world based on haptic vision, this paper proposes a method of automatic extraction of the 2D constraints among objects on the horizontal plane. A method is also proposed to describe the mutual constraints among objects in the 3D space, based on the hierarchical structure of the extracted 2D mutual constraints. It is verified from the results of experiments using the haptic vision system that the horizontal support relation among rigid objects is extracted faithfully to the real world. It is also verified that the system is useful in realizing virtual object manipulations which are faithful to the real world, by using extracted mutual constraint among objects as an input to a virtual space simulator with a haptic interface. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 86(11): 75–85, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.10130