AbstractsEngineering

Recent years have witnessed a growing demand for high performance controllers for complex haptic simulation applications. Haptic simulation employs a robotic device to render interaction forces with a remote environment or with an environment which only virtually exists as computer simulation. Such implementation inspires a vast area of applications from education, medical, and military fields to industrial, gaming, and social interaction. An ideal haptic controller should provide the user with realistic sense of touch creating an immersive perception of reality. However, in practice, the process involves a number of non-ideal factors which embark various undesirable haptic artifacts destroying the illusion of reality. The non-idealities are originated from a combination of factors namely, time discretization, sampling, timedelay,quantization and discontinuities, hold functions, and noise. These factors are tightly interconnected and together can reshape the dynamics of the system leading to instability, chatter, and other problematic artifacts. Overcoming these effects is particularly challenging when rendering high impedance interactions with highly dynamic virtual systems. Currently a growing gap exists between the requirements of complex applications, and the performance and functionality of most available rendering methods which motivates further efforts toward developing high performance force-feedback controllers.This thesis proposes a unified haptic framework comprising several multi-level solutions in order to mitigate the non-ideal effects and deliver high performance and realistic haptic rendering. The dynamics of the interacting virtual system is also taken into account in the provided solutions allowing for high fidelity interactions with a wide range of dynamic systems. Developing a high performance force-feedback system requires a solid understanding of the underlying processes and their multidisciplinary nature. For this reason, the fundamental processes in impedance-control-based haptic simulation are investigated in the forthcoming chapters. Various sources of the non-ideal effects are identified and appropriate solutions are provided to tackle the associated problems. These solutions incorporate a significant amount of noveltiescontributing to the existing body of knowledge in haptics. This work is supported by extensive simulation and experimental results for different types of haptic scenarios. Ces dernières années ont connu une demande croissante pour des contrôleurs de haute performance dans le cadre de simulation complexes avec retour haptique. Les simulations haptiques utilisent un dispositif robotique dans le but de rendre des forces dinteraction avec un environnement simulé ou à distance. Ces realisations inspirent un vaste domaine dapplications en éducation, en médecine et militaires, ainsi que dans l'industrie, les jeux et les interactions sociales. Le contrôleur haptique ideal doit fournir à son utilisateur un sens réaliste du touché, créant ainsi une perceptionimmersive de la…