Haptic molecular simulation based on force control

In this paper, force control is proposed to connect a molecular simulator to a haptic device. Most of the works dealing with this kind of simulators use position control to manipulate the molecules, with major stability concerns. These two control modes are compared in terms of adequacy with the molecular simulator. Stability with respect to the scaling coefficients introduced to connect the macro and the nanoworlds is also considered. The theoretical results and the experiments carried out confirm that position control is sensitive to the gain tuning. Force control enables to get stable force feedback for varying gains, and is thus a promising coupling to perform manipulations on complex molecular systems.