The design and development of a haptic force-matching device

maxon Group Australia designed and developed an all in one device that sensed and measured the subjective perception of pressure.

Constructed entirely in-house by maxon Australia’s R&D team led by Dr Carlos Bacigalupo and working with Macquarie University PhD Candidate David McNaughton, maxon delivered a complete solution to sense and measure the subjective perception of pressure.

The device integrated haptic technology and complex electrical engineering. The haptic system is based on a maxon RE50 brushed 200W DC motor driven by a maxon EPOS 50/5 motor controller working in position control mode. The motor includes an AEDL 5810 encoder with 5000 counts per turn over 3 channels with a line driver that adds a single pulse per turn for reference.

maxon’s RE50 DC motor was selected because of its linear characteristics, detent free, coreless rhombic winding design, proportionally low mass inertia and a high torque constant of 242mNm/A allowing for extremely fine control over the applied pressure.

The instrument had to comply with well-defined experimental protocols and a paper has been published by PhD Candidate David McNaughton with co-authors Dr Carlos Bacigalupo from maxon Group Australia and Alissa Beath, Julia Hush and Alicia Georghiades from Macquarie University. The paper is entitled “The Design, Development and Functionality of a Haptic Force-Matching Device for Measuring Sensory Attenuation” and describes in detail the design, development and functionality of a force-matching device used for experimental psychophysiological testing such that it could be reproduced by any other research group.

For application requirements involving system design, engineering, integration and complete drive systems please contact maxon Group Australia tel. +61 2 9457 7477.

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