Design of a device for the high-fidelity haptic rendering of rotatory car doors

To enable a realistic virtual prototyping of both actuated and unactuated rotatory car doors, a dedicated haptic device is developed. A fundamental issue is the derivation of the specific requirements for this interface, which is done based on knowledge of the typical user interaction with a car door and a comprehensive model of the dynamics of an actuated as well as an unactuated car door. The findings are that the device should only exhibit one rotatory degree-of-freedom, which should be actuated by a direct drive with a high torque output (ges 100 Nm) and very high position resolution (ges 16 Bit). A suitable direct-drive is selected and combined with other elements to form a backlash-free, very stiff haptic device. Due to both force and acceleration sensing, it can serve for the haptic rendering of actuated as well as unactuated car doors. Furthermore, a thorough safety scheme ensures a safe operation of the human-system-interaction.