Experimental evaluation of haptic support systems for learning a 2-DoF tracking task

This paper investigates use of a haptic support system for learning purposes. A 2 Degrees of Freedom (DoF) haptic force feedback system was designed for a dual-axes compensatory tracking task. The haptic system was used in a human-in-the-loop experiment with inexperienced participants on a fixed-base simulator. In the experiment, participants were divided into 3 groups. All participants performed 30 trials of the compensatory tracking task. One group of participants (NoHA group) performed the whole experiment without haptic aid. The other two groups (HA20 and HA10 groups) performed a training phase with haptic aid, followed by an evaluation phase without haptic feedback. The HA20 group performed 20 trials in the training phase, whereas the HA10 group performed only 10 trials. The results show that haptic aid was beneficial for performing the tracking task in the training phase for both the axes, compared to manual control. In the pitch axis performance of the HA20 group did not worsen when the feedback was switched off, whereas a considerable deterioration in performance was visible for HA10 group. Thus, haptic force feedback was effective to learn the control task in the pitch axis, compared to manual control. In the roll axis overall performance was found to be worse than the pitch axis. Moreover no benefits were found from training with haptic feedback in the roll axis for both the haptic groups.