PhD: Dual-user Haptic Training System

Student: Fei LIU LinkedIn

Supervised with Pr. Tanneguy Redarce (director), and Damien Eberard

Period: started in October 2013 and defended on 09/22/2016

Report: available in English in PDF here

Research project: DUAL USER TRAINING SIMULATION

Financed by China Scholarship Council (CSC)

Realized after: 2013 MSc: Dual User Haptic Training System

Current position: Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville

Publications: LIU1-15, LIU2-15, LIU-16

Keywords: Haptics, Simulation, Fellowship Training, Hands-on Training, Dual-User System, Passivity, Comparative Study, Communication Delay, Port-Hamiltonian Modelling

Summary

More particularly in the medical field, gesture quality is primordial. Professionals have to follow hands-on trainings to acquire a sufficient level of skills in the call of duty. For a decade, computer based simulators have helped the learners in numerous learnings, but these simulations still have to be associated with hands-on trainings on manikins, animals or cadavers, even if they do not always provide a sufficient level of realism and they are costly in the long term. Therefore, their training period has to finish on real patients, which is risky.

Haptic simulators (furnishing an effort feeling) are becoming a more appropriated solution as they can reproduce realist efforts applied by organs onto the tools and they can provide countless prerecorded use cases. However, learning alone on a simulator is not always efficient compared to a fellowship training (or supervised training) where the instructor and the trainee manipulate together the same tools.

Thus, this study introduces an haptic system for supervised hands-on training: the instructor and the trainee interoperate through their own haptic interface. They collaborate either with a real tool dived into a real environment (the tool is handled by a robotic arm), or with a virtual tool/environment. An energetic approach, using in particular the port-Hamiltonian modelling, has been used to ensure the stability and the robustness of the system.

This system has been designed and validated experimentally on a one degree of freedom haptic interface. A comparative study with two other dual-user haptic systems (in simulation) showed the interest of this new architecture for hands-on training. In order to use this system when both users are away from each other, this study proposes some enhancements to cope with constant communication time delays, but they are not optimized yet.