A preliminary study on development of haptic interface for underwater vehicles

This paper presents a method of force feedback for the haptic interface of underwater vehicles. The force feedback is implemented by estimating repulsive force based on the external sensor fusion. The repulsive force of the haptic system is composed of two parts: 1) the applied force to the underwater vehicle, and 2) a virtual force from the underwater obstacles. The applied force to the underwater vehicle is acquired by estimating the status of the vehicle using external sensors. Moreover, the virtual force is acquired from the distance between underwater obstacles and the vehicle. Using both sensorial data, the proposed method generates the repulsive force for the force feedback of haptic interface. The proposed method was verified by simple experiment in a basin.