Comparative study of haptic and visual feedback for kinesthetic training tasks

Haptics is the sense of simulating and applying the sense of human touch. Application of touch sensations is done with haptic interface devices. The past few years has seen the development of several haptic interface devices with a wide variety of technologies used in their design. This thesis introduces haptic technologies and includes a survey of haptic interface devices and technologies. An improvement in simulating and applying touch sensation when using the Quanser Haptic Wand with proSense(TM) software is suggested in this work using a novel five degree-of-freedom algorithm. This approach uses two additional torques to enhance the three degree-of-freedom of force feedback currently available with these products. Modern surgical trainers for performing laparoscopic surgery are incorporating haptic feedback in addition to visual feedback for training. This work presents a quantitative comparison of haptic versus visual training. One of the key results of the study is that haptic feedback is better than visual feedback for kinesthetic navigation tasks.