Modelling Contact Forces for 3D Interactive Peg-in-Hole Virtual Reality Operations

Haptic interfaces allow virtual reality users to experience the feeling of interacting forces while manipulating virtual objects. This paper discusses a model which is able to render in real-time the contact force/torque occurring in peg-in-hole operations in an interactive virtual reality environment. Results show that our implementation of haptic rendering can be well maintained at the required 1 KHz for a necessary fidelity without separating it from the time consuming collision detection. It is noticed that the hand's grasping posture on the tool should be an explicit parameter in the force/torque output function since it affects the feedback perception.