Design, Fabrication and Control of a Handheld Force-Feedback Device

In addition to the visual and auditory feedbacks, the force and torque feedbacks will definitely make the virtual environment more immersive. This idea has encouraged the researchers to go through the non-ground-based haptic interfaces containing these capabilities. In this paper, a new ungrounded haptic interface will be developed which can provide real sense of linear and angular momentum in three-dimensional space. Incorporation of a pair of propellers into the haptic interface will make it to continuously produce the desired forces and torques in less than 350 ms up to 15 N and 1 N.m, respectively. To orient the produced forces and torques in the desired and arbitrary directions in the three-dimensional space, these propellers are mounted on a set of sliders and gimbal rings. Due to the simple structure and effortless control of the proposed mechanism, rooted in the developed novelty in the mechanism design, the haptic interface can be more practical for the illusion of complex tasks in the daily uses. In this paper, the detailed design and force analysis of the haptic interface are followed by analytically derived kinematic and dynamic model, verified in MATLAB/Simscape Multibody. Then, the mathematical framework for the proposed controller is addressed, and afterward the robust stability analysis in the presence of structured and unstructured uncertainties is investigated. Eventually, a measuring prototype has been designed and manufactured to experimentally evaluate the performance of the haptic device and proposed control algorithm. The experiments show good performance of the proposed system and controller in the tracking of the various forces and torques on different paths.