Haptic Feedback Enhancement Through Adaptive Force Scaling: Theory and Experiment

We report the development, implementation, and evaluation of a novel application of robot force control called position based force scaling. Force scaling employs position based force control algorithms to augment human haptic feedback during human-robot co-manipulation tasks. We report the first results in the implementation of asymptotically exact force scaling, as well as the first results in on-line environment compliance adaptation while performing the task of force scaling. One previously reported and two new (one adaptive and one non-adaptive) force scaling algorithms are reviewed. Comparative experiments are reported which quantify the performance of all three algorithms. The data show that the new adaptive force scaling algorithm significantly outperforms both its non-adaptive counterpart as well as