Revisiting gradient-based haptic rendering for lateral force feedback in SPIDAR-mouse

The SPIDAR-mouse is a string-based haptic device that provides a PC mouse with 2D lateral force. Although the SPIDAR-mouse is convenient for displaying haptic feedback in a PC environment, it requires presenting 3D geometric shapes with 2D lateral force. An impulse-based haptic rendering method was used in our previous system, but the system response was insufficient for achieving realistic haptic interaction due to a huge number of polygons on the synthesized model. We revisit a gradient-based method combined with a penalty-based method to simulate contact between bumps and a probe in haptic rendering. A preliminary experiment was performed to evaluate the haptic rendering method for the lateral force feedback. The results show that the gradient-based method is comparable in terms of task performance to the impulse-based method for simple models with a small number of polygons.