Process division in haptic display system

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel inter-process communication, between a virtual world manager with slow update rate and a haptic controller with fast update rate, which incorporates the integrated force given from the user to the world. High-speed refresh rate, generally 1 kHz, is required to present stiff virtual objects that have spring-damper characteristic with haptic display. On the other hand, the managing of an interactive and rich virtual world that takes a lot of computational time makes the refresh rate as low as 10 Hz, which is enough for perceptual cycle. The dividing of the process into two has been proposed to interact with such a world and inter-process communication between the processes has been discussed. Although the methods proposed previously work well on condition that the virtual world is static, goes wrong on dynamic world. The importance of the integrated force on the object motion acquisition is described and an inter-process communication that cares about the integrated force is proposed to remove the influence of the sampling timing. An experimental result shows that the proposed method improve the accuracy of the operation.