Performance Issues in Collaborative Haptic Training

This paper proposes a new multilateral position-position shared control architecture for dual-user haptic training. The proposed controller allows interaction between both users, the trainee and the trainer, as well as between the users and the virtual slave robot and environment. It also allows for the adjustment of the dominance of the trainer over the trainee in interaction with the virtual slave and environment through a dominance factor parameter. The issue of transparency in such collaborative haptic simulation system has been discussed. A performance index has also been defined to quantify the users´ skill for a specific task under study. This metric is used to identify the maximum allowable dominance of the trainee over the trainer. Haptic simulation experiments have been carried out with two planar twin pantograph haptic devices and a simulated pantograph as the slave robot.