The effect of time delays on tele-haptics

Information technology has reached a limit in what can be done in training and doing remote tasks with only sight and sound. The next critical step is to add the sense of touch over network connections, otherwise known as tele-haptics. In this paper, an experimental demonstration involving a simple identification task has been developed, using a custom two degree-of-freedom haptic interface. The experiment shows quantitatively that haptics can be employed to greatly enhance user performance but the addition of simulated network time delay and sensor noise quickly degrades performance. It is demonstrated that time-delay compensation techniques can aid in situations where the time-delay and sensor noise make the equipment unusable. In addition, another experiment demonstrating tele-haptics using two MPB Freedom 6S haptic devices is discussed. Key issues in the implementation of such an experiment are presented and a description of the results is given.