High Fidelity Haptic Rendering of Stick-Slip Frictional Contact With Deformable Objects in Virtual Environments Using Multi-Rate Simulation

An increasingly common new modality in human-computer interaction is haptic interfacing, especially in the field of medical simulation. The order-of-magnitude difference in update rates between graphical deformable object simulations and haptic interfaces can be bridged using local low-order approximations. However, providing force feedback using local models complicates collision detection and response with the virtual tool, since the user interacts with lower-order proxies rather than the full simulated objects. A novel approach focusing on rolling contact with stick-slip friction is presented where all collision detection and response with the virtual tool is performed at the local level at the haptic time-scale, utilizing linearized low-order local models that approximate the behavior of the full model for the short time steps and small deformations involved.