GRASP Special Seminar – Milos Zefran, University of Illinois at Chicago, “Teaching Sensorimotor Skills with Haptic Playback”

Abstract: Haptic simulators are increasingly popular for teaching of sensorimotor skills. A useful feature of any training environment is the ability to record motor data streams of an expert and display them to a student. This talk will describe haptic playback, a framework for displaying motor streams in a haptic simulator. It will be argued that haptic playback calls for an explicit model of the human user; a simple model for the user will be subsequently presented, along with a preliminary validation through studies of human subjects. The model will be used to formulate a control strategy that achieves both force and position tracking by a cooperative user in a haptic environment. A human study will be then described that was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of the haptic playback for teaching of sensorimotor skills. The study suggests that superior tracking performance during training does not necessarily indicate superior effectiveness in motor skill acquisition. This work is motivated by PerioSim, a haptic virtual reality simulator for sensorimotor skill acquisition in dentistry.