Data-Driven Haptic Rendering of Visco-Elastic Effects

This paper introduces a purely data-driven haptic rendering approach that is capable of capturing and rendering visco-elastic material effects. Force data are captured while a human operator intuitively explores real objects. The recorded sparse interaction vectors are interpolated, thus yielding dense force fields. Based on this, appropriate haptic feedback can be rendered for new trajectories never recorded before. No explicit physical model of the deformable objects is utilized in this approach. The proposed method can handle arbitrary non-linear materials with visco-elastic behaviour. Moreover, we present a preliminary approach to incorporate sliding contacts, and an evaluation of the proposed methods in several comparison studies.