Quantitative Experimental Analysis of Transparency and Stability in Haptic Interfaces

The notion of haptic transparency is used to quantify the delity with which virtual object properties are presented to, and perceived by, the human operator. Experimental results are presented quantifying the ability of humans to detect diierences in mechanical impedances representing typical types of impedance corruption (loss of transparency) encountered in haptic interfaces due to stability-enhancing dynamic compensation. In particular, a poor connection is found between the stiiness of virtual walls and their perceptual \hardness", prompting a new deenition of hardness which is often dominated by the high frequency dynamics of the rendered impedance.