A Distributed Approach to Haptic Simulation

The quality of the physical haptic interaction and the need to link the haptic device or devices to high quality computer simulations in a time critical way are two key problems in modern haptic rendering. Additionally, in large simulation environments, the need to update the dynamic state of every object is required, even if the objects are not involved in haptic feedback. This can result in a decreasing haptic update rate for increasing simulation complexity. A possible way to address these conflicting requirements is to consider control structures that operate at differing loop times and consider issues such as stability in the context of these loop times. This paper therefore, outlines a flexible rendering architecture to manage the conflicting requirements of simulation quality and simulation speed across multiple devices.