Haptic texturing-a stochastic approach

All objects have a surface roughness which manifests itself as small forces when objects slide under load against each other Simulating this roughness hap tically enriches the interaction between a user and a virtual world just as creating graphical textures enhances the depiction of a scene As with graphical textures a major design constraint for haptic textures is the generation of a su ciently realistic texture given hard constraints on computational costs We present a simple fast algorithm to synthesize haptic textures from statistical properties of surfaces The synthesized texture can be overlaid on other contact models such as hard contact with Coulomb friction The algorithm requires minimal hardware support and can be implemented on a variety of force feedback mechanisms It has been successfully implemented on a two degree of freedom haptic interface the Panto graph