Transparent Collaborative Haptic Simulation

International audienceThis paper deals with the problem of transparency (or fidelity) in force feedback systems or more particularly for haptics simulation under time delay transmission. The haptics rendering transparency is all the more difficult in distributed collaboration between distant users because it is necessary also to make feel faithfully the mutual interactions. The idea suggested in this article gives an original solution to overcome this lack of transparency in haptic shared collaborations on the network using a principle called the "Latency Envelope" (LE). One advantage of this implementation is the anticipation of the contact between users and virtual objects. The delay can them be partially or completely compensated from the operator perception point of view. Also it does not affect at all the stability of haptics simulation (carried out using well known control laws)