Networked haptic cooperation among multiple users via virtual object coordination to averaged position of peer copies

This paper proposes a distributed haptic control architecture whose coordination gain at each user site is independent of the number of cooperating peers. In the proposed architecture, users interact through manipulating a shared virtual object (SVO) together. The distributed copies of the SVO are controlled through virtual couplers. At each peer, the gain of the force feedback loop is maintained constant regardless of the number of interacting users by coordinating the local SVO copy to the averaged motion of the other SVO copies. The motion of the SVO representative is computed by averaging the motion of all other SVO copies. A preliminary investigation contrasts the proposed controller to traditional distributed virtual coupling control. The comparison is performed via MATLAB simulations of an exemplary cooperative manipulation performed by three users. The results illustrate that the proposed controller: (1) can render a lighter SVO with decreased position coherence among the distributed SVO copies for the same stiffness of coordination; (2) achieves similar position coherence among the distributed SVO copies for the same SVO mass.