The project's long-term goal is to establish a strong research group capable of cooperation with the industry in the design and application of haptics interface in different application areas. The research objectives within this project are to establish fundamental blocks for internet-enabled haptics that would allow the expansion of research ni transmitting physical interaction experience (haptics interface) into different areas of application. That would allow the realization of the human-like motion of an artifact (robot or motion system), preservation of the haptic data, and record and reproduction of haptic experience with arbitrary scaling.
The work includes (a) development and testing of new haptic system control based on our previous work as a fundamental building block in hybrid position-force control; (b) proof of concept for recording and playback of haptic interaction; (c) proof of concept of the Internet of Skill ni which master side of the haptic system is virtual (a record of the haptic interaction) and slave side is a real physical system. Expected contributions are in the: i) understanding of fundamental concepts and limits (complexity/ performance tradeoff), ii) algorithmic solutions for haptic systems control with high transparency, and iii) initial results in developing a method of recording haptic interactions and development of algorithms for recreation of haptic experience over the internet. The work program is composed of three work packages carried out by the PI, researchers, and graduate and undergraduate students. The project is ambitious but deemed feasible due to the strong track-record of the PI.
