Whole Body Control for Haptic Interaction with VR

In this paper, we present a Quadratic Programming (QP) based Whole-Body Control (WBC) approach to generating Haptic Interaction with Virtual Reality. The primary challenge of controlling haptic feedback devices is the ability to create realistic contact forces for static or dynamic contact scenarios at any time, while otherwise not impeding the motion of a user. The combination of four control tasks in a WBC solves this problem by providing a general solution for generating haptic feedback for any interaction with a virtual object. We present a method to decouple the real and virtual dynamics of the system through the introduction of a Haptic Contact Object (HCO), which simplifies the representation of virtual interactions for feedback to the high-level controller. We implement our controller on a 10-DOF upper-body powered exoskeleton and demonstrate its effectiveness at generating sufficient haptic feedback for static, dynamic, and no contact scenarios.