ICRA Workshop on ICRA 2007
Haptic Perception & Rendering Endorsed by the IEEE RAS/CS Technical Committee on Haptics
Tuesday, April 10, 2007, 8:30am - 6:00pm.
Aula 21, School of Engineering, Università di Roma "La Sapienza",
Via Eudossiana 18, Rome.

Workshop overview

Summary Statement

In recent years, there has been an important development of techniques for haptic rendering of rich environments. At the core of this development lie findings about human force and tactile perception, algorithms and representations for modeling and displaying contact, and mechanical actuation and acquisition technologies. In a multidisciplinary field like haptics, the synergy of results from multiple areas, such as robotics, psychophysics, or computer graphics, plays a crucial role in successful developments.

In an attempt to strengthen the advances in haptics, this workshop will bring together an excellent group of interdisciplinary researchers who will share their latest discoveries with the rest of the robotics community. The workshop will focus on two large aspects of research in haptics: perception and acquisition of the environment; and modeling and rendering of contact, manipulation, and interaction among objects.

Organizers

Miguel A. Otaduy, ETH Zurich
Dinesh K. Pai, University of British Columbia / Rutgers University

Abstract

The human haptic system provides unique and bidirectional communication with our physical environment. Extending the frontier of visual computing, haptic interfaces increase the quality of human-computer interaction by accommodating the sense of touch. They enhance the exploration and level of understanding of geometric and mechanical properties of synthetic models; provide force and tactile presence in teleoperated environments; and enable natural manipulation of simulated objects. Haptic interfaces are successfully used for a number of applications including surgical training, virtual prototyping, molecular docking, manipulation of nano-materials, and digital sculpting.

The development of effective haptic interfaces and rendering algorithms relies on a thorough understanding of the human haptic perception system. The workshop will briefly cover fundamentals of human haptic perception, such as the sensory elements involved, their characteristics, the cognitive process of recognizing haptic properties, and cross-modal interaction. Fundamentals will be complemented with recent findings on haptic perception, discrimination of roughness, shape, and compliance in static or dynamic contact settings, and how this knowledge can be exploited in rendering algorithms. Tied to the topic of haptic perception, the workshop will continue with the description of methods for acquisition of human and material mechanical quantities, such as joint impedances or surface properties, and their application in contact modeling.

The stringent performance requirements of haptic rendering call for extremely efficient methods for modeling manipulation and contact between objects. This workshop will cover recent advances in collision detection for geometrically complex objects that exploit human perceptual properties, algorithms for simulation of rigid contact in the context of the haptic rendering pipeline, reduced-complexity models for simulating rich deformations and modeling contact between deformable models, and novel perceptually driven event-based rendering paradigms. The topic of rendering will be completed with an overview of actuation technologies for conveying various haptic stimuli at different scales.

We expect that the subjects covered in the workshop will provide not complete, but broad coverage of recent results in haptic perception and rendering, which will excite future research in this area.

©2007