Tandem Canoeing over the Internet using Haptic Feedback

A cooperative tandem canoeing task with haptic feedback is developed for internet application. A pair of InMotion2 robots provide stroke commands to the boat and force feedback to the operators while a flat screen panel displays the virtual environment to the participants. OpenInventor is used to generate the graphical environment while a realistic dynamics engine runs concurrently on an RT Linux box. Experimental results are presented for racing a straightline canoe course, and future work involving new input devices and virtual environments are discussed.