Haptic simulation of refrigerator door

Recently, haptics has begun to impact consumer products, e.g., mobile phones and automobiles. In this paper, we introduce one such new application, that is, haptic simulation of refrigerator operation, and present an initial prototype for the front door. A one degree-of-freedom haptic interface is designed and built to provide torque feedback of the front door. Simulation software consisting of system control, graphic renderer, and haptic renderer are also developed. For haptic rendering, the motion dynamics of a refrigerator door is modeled, and the haptic renderer is implemented based on the dynamics model. Lastly, we report a user experiment carried out to assess the perceived similarity between simulated and real door operations, i.e., the realism, which shows promising results.