Design and Evaluation of a High-Performance Haptic Interface R. E. Ellis O. M. Ismaeil M. G. Lipsett Department of Computing and Information Science Department of Mechanical Engineering Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6 ABSTRACT A haptic interface is a computer-controlled mechanism designed to detect motion of a human operator without impeding that motion, and to feed back forces from a teleoperated robot or virtual environment. Design of such a device is not trivial, because of the many conflicting constraints the designer must face. As part of our research into haptics, we have developed a prototype planar mechanism. It has low apparent mass and damping, high structural stiffness, high force bandwidth, high force dynamic range, and an absence of mechanical singularities within its workspace. We present an analysis of the human-operator and mechanical constraints that apply to any such device, and propose methods for the evaluation of haptic interfaces. Our evaluation criteria are derived from the original task analysis, and are a first step towards a replicable methodology for comparing the performance of different devices. 1. Introduction One intriguing theme in robotics research is the construction of a haptic 1 interface – a device that can sense a human operator’s hand motion, and actuate the operator with forces or torques, without significantly impeding the hand motion. A haptic interface could be useful in such dynamical tasks as the teleoperation of a remote robot, the characterization of human motor performance, conducting psychophysical experiments on haptics, and the interaction of a human with a virtual environment. Application tasks that may benefit from dynamic teleoperation include handling materials in hazardous environments (such as radioactive material or biological agents), remotely operating in an environment in which safe human presence is expensive to achieve and maintain (such as outside a space station or on the ocean floor), and amplifying or reducing human-scale (such as wielding large structures or performing microsurgery). 1 The haptic system in humans is the sensory system which includes proprioceptive sensing of muscle/tendon states as well as tactile sensing of skin deformation. The psychophysical literature indicates that, for many tasks, the information is integrated early in the sensing process and so it is proper to speak of the system as a whole when a human hand/arm interacts with the environment. I N: Robotica 14:321–327