Haptic feedback improves manual excitation of a sprung mass

In this paper, we present an experiment in which human subjects were asked to manually excite a virtual sprung mass into resonance under various feedback conditions: visual, haptic or visual and haptic combined. We are interested in comparing the value of these feedback conditions in terms of their influence on the achievable performance in a dynamic task such as exciting a resonant mechanical system. From our human subject experiment (n=10), we found that with haptic feedback alone, subjects successfully excited the sprung mass into resonance. For the particular case of ω_n = 7 rad/s, subjects demonstrated significantly larger differences between the observed and expected frequency distribution under vision-only (paired t-test: p=0.034) and haptics-only feedback conditions (paired t-test: p=0.021), as compared to combined vision with haptic feedback. Variability of key marker locations of input behavior were also significantly lower with both feedback channels than with either alone (paired t-tests: p<.0002). Our results show that haptic feedback can augment vision to produce significant improvements in the control of a dynamic system.