Analysis of virtual environment haptic robotic systems for a rehabilitation of post-stroke patients

Haptic refers to feedback of a physical signal to a human user through touch. A haptic system realizes this feedback. In most of the applications today, the physical signal refers to force but not necessary. Virtual environment haptic systems refers to the situation where the force to be feedback from the objects in a virtual environment or computer. Virtual environment haptic robotic systems are widely used for rehabilitation and training of surgeon. However, currently, these systems seem to be qualitative; as such the training goal can never be precise. The root cause for this shortcoming is absence of theoretical analysis of virtual environment haptic robotic systems. This paper reports our work on a theoretical analysis of the virtual environment haptic robotic system. A commercial system Phantom Omni was taken as a case system to facilitate this research. This research has a generalized implication to any kind of virtual environment haptic robotic system as well as to general Human-Machine Cooperative Robot, a kind of which is the haptic system.