Finite elements, mass-spring-damper systems and haptic rendering

Haptic feedback can be classified as a branch of robotic force (compliant) control (computation) area. In the traditional force control areas, the objective is to regulate the desired contact force between a robotic agent an environment through design of a control law which has some model of the compliance embedded into it. For the haptic feedback environment, the user interacts with the graphical environment through a robotic device (force-feedback mechanism). The feedback force at the hand of the user is generated through computational model of how the virtual object reacts to the input from the user when it is penetrating the model of an environment. There are a number of computational elements involve in creating a haptic environment. This paper concerns with haptic rendering which is a complementary module to the graphical rendering of the virtual scene. Haptic rendering is the computation of the reaction forces and deformation as a function of the geometrical interaction of the user with the environment. This paper presents an overview of a number of approaches, which has been used to model the environment and presents a new computationally efficient approach for modeling compliance of the environment.