CAREER: Passivity-Based Distributed Frameworks for Multiuser Shared Haptic Collaboration over the Internet

该项目的主要目标是为互联网上地理分布的多个用户之间的稳定和高保真共享触觉协作提供理论基础。为此，该项目利用：1)分布式架构实现每个用户的实时响应？it’触觉反馈与互联网无关？年代延迟;2)被动性（总分布式架构）作为与广泛的异质人类用户进行触觉交互的鲁棒稳定性手段。更具体地说，该项目关注并研究了以下三个关键研究任务：1)用于共享虚拟环境的一致/可扩展部署的离散时间被动触觉仿真算法，特别是在（计算）异构用户之间；2)基于物理的被动层次模型简化框架，以减轻通信/计算负担，特别是当共享虚拟环境是大规模的；3)基于Internet的高性能被动本地副本同步框架，以实现清晰/稳定的共享触觉体验，并在通信不完善的情况下实现基本的性能限制。通过提供系统的和理论的框架，这个项目将显著地推进目前的艺术状态，这在很大程度上是启发式的，特设的和定性的。该项目也有望为一般触觉/遥控机器人以及邻近的研究领域产生新的结果/视角/框架。该项目奠定的理论基础将使许多强大的应用更接近现实（例如虚拟协同外科培训，制造前产品评估，虚拟协同雕刻，触觉网络游戏等）。也许更重要的是，这个项目可能会从根本上改变我们在网络空间中相互交流的方式。该项目的教育/传播活动将包括：开发新的动手和研究级机器人课程；学生咨询/辅导，特别是少数民族学生；面向K-12年级学生的触觉夏令营，尤其是针对女生的夏令营；在当地高中举办研讨会和公开示威；项目网站，国际合作和书籍写作。

The main goal of this project is to develop theoretical foundations for robustly-stable and high-fidelity shared haptic collaboration among geographically-distributed multiple users over the Internet. For this, the project utilizes: 1) distributed architecture for real-time responsiveness of each user?s haptic feedback regardless of Internet?s latency; and 2) passivity (of total distributed architecture) as a means for robust-stability of haptic interaction with a wide-range of heterogeneous human users. More specifically, the project focuses and investigates the following three key research tasks: 1) discrete-time passive haptic simulation algorithms for consistent/scalable deployment of the shared virtual environment, particularly among (computationally) heterogeneous users; 2) haptically-convincing physics-based passive hierarchical model reduction frameworks to mitigate communication/computing burdens, particularly when the shared virtual environment is of large-scale; and 3) high-performance passive local replica synchronization frameworks over the Internet for crisp/stable shared haptic experience, and fundamental performance limitation given communication imperfectness.By providing systematic and theoretical frameworks, this project will significantly advance the current state of the art, which is largely heuristic, ad-hoc and qualitative. This project is also expected to produce new results/perspectives/frameworks for general haptics/telerobotics as well as for adjacent research fields. The theoretical foundations laid by this project will make many powerful applications closer to reality (e.g. virtual collaborative surgical training, pre-manufacturing product evaluation, virtual collaborative sculpting, haptically-enabled networked games, etc). Perhaps more importantly, this project may fundamentally change how we interact with each other in the cyberspace. Education/dissemination activities of this project will include: development of new hands-on and research-level robotics courses; student advising/mentoring, particularly for minority students; haptics summer camp for K-12, particularly for female students; seminars in local high schools and public demonstrations; project web site, international collaboration, and book writing.