The Effects of Admittance Term on Back-Drivability

Abstract

In the design of kinesthetic haptic devices, there are mainly impedance type and admittance type device. In a customary scenario, the human operator back-drives the haptic device by holding and providing motion to the handle of the haptic device. If the type of transmission system does not allow passive back-drivability, then the back-drivability is satisfied by the use of an admittance controller. This type of a haptic device is said to have admittance structure. The selection of the admittance term in this controller plays a critical part in the task execution performance. Determination of this term is not trivial and the optimal parameters depend on not only the key performance criteria but also on the human operator. An experimental study is carried out in this work to determine the effect of the admittance term parameters on the performance of human operators in terms of the energy efficiency and the best accuracy. In this paper, the experimental set-up and the results of the experiments are presented and discussed.