Study on force display system using couple of ER brakes

Force information in virtual space is important and often required for tele-operation, training, amusement, design supporting and other virtual reality systems. While conventional force displays are active systems with actuators and therefore may become inherently dangerous, passive force displays, which use only passive elements, are an effective methods for assuring safety. However, passive type systems have some directions and link postures, which are hard to present force. To this problem, a method for improvement of controllability using redundant couple of brakes had been suggested. It was able to be considered this method made it possible to display various force directions and various postures of virtual objects. The purpose of this study was, for further improvement of controllability of systems with redundant couples of brakes, design and development of more generalized redundant mechanism by adding another element of design freedom. Moreover, improvement of force display-ability by reducing equivalent inertia was also aimed. In this paper, the developed system was outlined and basic experiments with it discussed.