Effect of Dual-rate Sampling on the Stability of a Haptic Interface

A Human Arm’s Mechanical Impedance Tuning Method for Improving the Stability of Haptic Rendering

Rendering of rigid objects with high stiffness while guaranteeing system stability remains a major and challenging issue in haptics. Being a part of the haptic system, the behavior of human operators, represented as the mechanical impedance of arm, has an inevitable influence on system performance. This paper first verified that the human arm impedance can unconsciously be modified through imposing background forces and resist unstable motions arising from external disturbance forces. Then, a reliable impedance tuning (IT) method for improving the stability and performance of haptic systems is proposed, which tunes human arm impedance by superimposing a position-based background force over the traditional haptic workspace. Moreover, an adaptive IT algorithm, adjusting the maximum background force based on the velocity of the human arm, is proposed to achieve a reasonable trade-off between system stability and transparency. Based on a three-degrees-of-freedom haptic device, maximum achievable stiffness and transparency grading experiments are carried out with 12 subjects, which verify the efficacy and advantage of the proposed method.

Multirate control strategies for avoiding sample losses. Application to UGV path tracking

When in a digital control strategy there are samples lost due to limitations, different multirate (MR) control options can be used for solving the problem: Dual-rate inferential control (IC) and model-based dual-rate control (MBDR). The objective of this contribution is to analyze, compare, and to assess their behavior under different perspectives. Is a dual-rate inferential control better than a model-based dual-rate control? Both options lead to a periodically time-varying discrete-time system and for this reason a lifted modeling is considered. An efficient algorithm is used for computing a MR system's frequency response for these control structures. The robust performance and disturbance effects are studied in detail under sample losses and process uncertainty, and some considerations are reported. A new QFT (quantitative feedback theory) procedure for dual-rate systems analysis is also described. Analysis and simulation examples and experimental results for UGV path tracking are introduced in this work, revealing that MBDR outperforms IC when the model contains important uncertainties.