In the past decades, a variety of haptic devices have been developed to facilitate high-fidelity human-computer interaction (HCI) in virtual reality (VR). In particular, passive haptic feedback can create a compelling sensation based on real objects spatially overlapping with their virtual counterparts. However, these approaches require pre-deployment efforts, hindering their democratizing use in practice. We propose the Tracking Calibrated Robot (TCR), a novel and general haptic approach to free developers from deployment efforts, which can be potentially deployed in any scenario. Specifically, we augment the VR with a collaborative robot that renders haptic contact in the real world while the user touches a virtual object in the virtual world. The distance between the user's finger and the robot end-effector is controlled over time. The distance starts to smoothly reduce to zero when the user intends to touch the virtual object. A mock user study tested users' perception of three virtual objects, and the result shows that TCR is effective in terms of conveying discriminative shape information.

翻译：过去数十年间，研究人员开发了多种触觉设备以促进虚拟现实中高保真人机交互。其中，被动触觉反馈可通过与虚拟对象空间重叠的真实物体创造引人入胜的感知体验。然而，这类方法需要预先部署，阻碍了其在实际应用中的推广普及。我们提出"标定机器人追踪"（TCR）这一新颖且通用的触觉方法，使开发者摆脱部署负担，可潜在地应用于任何场景。具体而言，我们通过协作机器人增强虚拟现实系统——当用户在虚拟世界中触碰虚拟物体时，机器人可在现实世界中呈现触觉接触。用户指尖与机器人末端执行器间的距离随时间受控变化：当用户意欲触碰虚拟物体时，该距离开始平滑缩减至零。模拟用户实验测试了参与者对三种虚拟物体的感知效果，结果表明TCR在传递差异性形状信息方面具有有效性。