Improving the realism of haptic interaction for teaching of sensorimotor skills

Recently, haptic simulators have shown great potential in teaching sensorimotor skills. This is especially true for areas where the traditional training technique is expensive, such as medical and dental training. This work addresses two areas where improvement is needed to increase the realism of haptic interaction and the effectiveness in teaching of sensorimotor skills. The first part of the work is about haptic rendering algorithms. Modern penalty-based haptic rendering algorithms do not produce realistic forces in certain situations. A new method for haptic rendering is implemented based on physics rather than on heuristics. At the same time the new method is fast enough to be executed in the allowed time frame. The second part of the work deals with the problem of recording and playing back motor streams for sensorimotor tasks. This provides a way to convey the information necessary to master a new skill from a teacher to a trainee. Haptic playback was found to be effective for teaching sensorimotor skills with significant position and force components. The work concludes with the description of PerioSim, a haptic virtual reality simulator developed for sensorimotor skill acquisition in dentistry.