Haptic Interactions Subject to Variable Latency

Abstract

Model-Mediated Teleoperation (MMT) between a haptic device and a remote or virtual environment uses a local model of the environment to compensate for latency of communication. MMT is often case-specific, and requires underlying latency distributions to be known. We propose a novel approach – which we refer to as the DelayRIM – which uses the timestepping aspect of a Reduced Interface Model for the virtual environment to render an up-to-date force to the haptic device from the delayed information. RIM is applicable to any physical system, and the DelayRIM itself makes no underlying assumption about the latency distribution. We show that for realistic variable delays, the DelayRIM improves transparency compared to other methods.