Design of Haptic Experience Recording for Guide-dog Training

In recent years, the need for guide dogs has increased, and a more efficient methodology for training guide dog trainers is accordingly required. One challenge is that haptic information, which is a significant part of guide-dog training, is difficult to explain and visualize. Virtual reality (VR) systems have attracted attention owing to their ability to support high-level immersive interactions with the presence of multisensory experiences. A haptic-enabled VR system could address the limitations of the conventional method and support novice trainers in practicing in an immersive and remote transmission manner. This study presents a handle-based sensing setup for recording haptic experiences of trainers during guide dog training for use in a VR system. Considering trainers perceive and apply forces via handle to obtain and control dog motion status, the applied forces are decoded as haptic information and recorded using corresponding sensors. While accuracy of proposed setup for collecting required data is checked to be high(average errors of validating forces and yaw angles are 0.4N and 0.93° respectively), we believe that the proposed recording system is able to measure haptic experiences for further haptic experience re-establishments in proposed VR guide-dog training system and could finally facilitate the education of a large number of dog trainers.