Ohnishi Lab Experience (guest post by Omar Daud)
The Ohnishi Lab is a center of excellence that is a branch of the Department of System Design Engineering, Keio University. Their main research activity is focused on humanoid robots, bilateral robots and flywheels. The proposed activity that we had in mind to do in the Ohnishi Lab was to establish a communication, via TCP/IP or UDP, between their linear actuators and our virtual worlds, and to use these actuators as haptic interfaces to interact with our virtual environments.
The Ohnishi Lab is a center of excellence that is a branch of the Department of System Design Engineering, Keio University. Their main research activity is focused on humanoid robots, bilateral robots and flywheels. The proposed activity that we had in mind to do in the Ohnishi Lab was to establish a communication, via TCP/IP or UDP, between their linear actuators and our virtual worlds, and to use these actuators as haptic interfaces to interact with our virtual environments.
The block diagram of the system may be characterized by the following configuration:
Figure 1. Block diagram of the configuration of the system.
The elements that we used for building the above configuration were:
- A linear actuator as a haptic device.
- V-Realm Builder 2.0 for the development of the virtual world.
- Matlab/Simulink.
- Handshake proSENSE Virtual Touch toolbox.
- The network as the interface between the device and the PC.
Once the communication was achieved, the scope was to compensate the current offset of the actuator and to reproduce the force feedback as a response due to the interaction between the haptic interface and the virtual world. As an example to show here, weíve recreated the situation in which you have to pass through a moving donut.
Figure 2. Force feedback and end-effector position of the device.
