Final Report Summary - PROHAPTICS (Haptic Signal Processing and Communications)
ProHaptics has advanced the state-of-the-art in the area of haptic communications. During the project we have gained a substantially improved understanding of the characteristics and limitations of human kinesthetic and tactile perception. The findings have been intergrated into perceptual coding schemes which support the haptic interaction across a communication network with reduced communication effort. The developed approaches have been tightly integrated with previously proposed stability-ensuring control architectures in the context of teleoperation scenarios. The project has developed objective quality metrics for haptic communiction which present an important step towards the computer-based assessment of haptic interaction quality, something that today can only be determined by means of costly and time-consuming subjective tests. Besides the aforementioned results, the multiplexing of audio-visual information with haptic data has been addressed and the developed multiplexing schemes adequately reflect the drastically different delay requirements of the different modalities. The results have also been transfered to Shared Haptic Virtual Environments including the manipulation of deformable objects. All methods and techniques have been investigated theoretically and validated experimentally using Virtual Environments as well as using a real-world teleoperation setup which has been developed within the ProHaptics project.