Haptic Display Software for Hiqh Level Architecture Simulations

Future High Level Architecture (HLA) simulations will incorporate non-visual stimuli. One such stimulus will be force feedback that is provided using haptic displays. Force feedback will be instrumental in o btaining high fidelity information exchange between the simulation and the user. However, one significant problem with providing force feedback between a simulation and a user is that time delays associated with computational requirements or finite bandwidth communication links between the haptic display and distributed simulation processors and databaases can cause instability. Creare's innovation is to convert the kinematic information that is typically transferred between the haptic display and simulations into the mathematical equivalent of a transmission line. We will demonstrate that this results in a system that is guaranteed to be stable, regardless of the length or structure of the time delay. This results because transmission lines can be shown to be passive and passive systems, by definition, are guaranteed to be stable. During Phase I, Creare will incorporate our algorighm into a federated object model and demonstrate a real-time implementation. During Phase II, we will build and demonstrate multiple federated object models and provide real-time haptic feedback while interacting with a distributed simulation and database.