Haptic texturing-a stochastic approach

All objects have a surface roughness which manifests itself as small forces when objects slide under load against each other. Simulating this roughness haptically enriches the interaction between a user and a virtual world, just as creating graphical textures enhances the depiction of a scene. As with graphical textures, a major design constraint for haptic textures is the generation of a sufficiently “realistic” texture given hard constraints on computational costs. The authors present a simple, fast algorithm to synthesize haptic textures from statistical properties of surfaces. The synthesized texture can be overlaid on other contact models, such as hard contact with Coulomb friction. The algorithm requires minimal hardware support, and can be implemented on a variety of force-feedback mechanisms. It has been successfully implemented on a two-degree-of-freedom haptic interface (the Pantograph)