Design and Implementation of Haptic Tele-mentoring over the Internet

Abstract

Haptic tele-mentoring refers to an educational technique in which the mentor can teach the mentee, in a hand-by-hand manner over communication networks, through the coupling of two haptic devices. Essentially, the realization of tele-mentoring relies on the efficient transmission of haptic information, such that either end of the network can sense and/or impart forces. A few of obstacles in developing the tele-mentoring applications over the internet are network delay, jitter, and packet loss. These impairments potentially affect the stability of the tele-mentoring system and degrade the feeling of guiding. This paper analyzes the design and implementation constraints of the system, as well as the simulation and experimental results. To compensate for the network latency, a novel approach based on the behaviors of the human arm trajectory is proposed to lower the overshoot so as to improve the overall system stability. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the anti-overshoot algorithm.