Rendering stiffer walls: a hybrid haptic system using continuous and discrete time feedback

Instability in conventional haptic rendering destroys the perception of rigid objects in virtual environments. Inherent limitations in the conventional haptic loop restrict the maximum stiffness that can be rendered. In this paper we present a method to render virtual walls that are much stiffer than those achieved by conventional techniques. By removing the conventional digital haptic loop and replacing it with a part-continuous and part-discrete time hybrid haptic loop, we were able to render stiffer walls. The control loop is implemented as a combinational logic circuit on an field-programmable gate array. We compared the performance of the conventional haptic loop and our hybrid haptic loop on the same haptic device, and present mathematical analysis to show the limit of stability of our device. Our hybrid method removes the computer-intensive haptic loop from the CPU—this can free a significant amount of resources that can be used for other purposes such as graphical rendering and physics modeling. It is our hope that, in the future, similar designs will lead to a haptics processing unit (HPU).     

Indirect adaptive control of a two-wheeled vehicle with low-resolution input and output

The Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) is widely used in the industrial world, e.g. in manufacturing, chemical processing, materials handling, etc. The PLC-based control system can be regarded as a control system with low-resolution inputs and outputs. This paper presents a sophisticated control policy which can enhance the control performance for such a class of control system even if the complete information of the plant is not available. In particular, the case of existing uncertainty or perturbations in the input matrix is addressed. The key contribution of this paper is to clarify the identifiability condition for parameters included in the input matrix from measured low-resolution inputs and outputs. This investigation leads to the development of an indirect adaptive control policy with low-resolution inputs and outputs. Finally, the proposed indirect adaptive control policy is applied to the line-following control of a two-wheeled vehicle and its usefulness is demonstrated through experiment.