Haptic feedback is the feedback of force information to the human operator via a bilateral teleoperation system. Examples of the use of haptic feedback in practice are
• surgery: surgeons use robotic devices to operate. Haptic feedback enables surgeon to feel and discriminate between tissues;
• maintenance: maintenance experts use teleoperation systems to carry out tasks in dangerous and/or remote areas. Haptic feedback provides a better understanding of the task.
• automotive: drivers can be provided with haptic information on speed and steering clues, hereby increasing road safety.
For the understanding of haptic feedback, different disciplines are combined, e.g., human perception, hardware design and control design. In this course, focus lies on the control design aspect and the impact of control design on the performance and stability of these systems. This course handles time-invariant and real-time control architectures, stability analysis, common performance measures and time delay problems. This course includes a number of applications and demo's, including robots for medical purposes, haptics for remote handling and haptics in automotive.