Reality-Based Haptic Force Models of Buttons and Switches

Accurate models of the feel of physical objects are essential to improving the realism of haptic simulations. This paper presents a method for automatically obtaining experimentally based models of general passive, nonlinear devices for use in haptic playback applications, with specific emphasis on modeling switches and buttons. The method, based on the exponentially weighted least-squares (EWLS), allows estimation of position- and direction-dependent parameters of a general nonlinear model. Results are presented for two push-button switches.