Data Repository for Haptic Algorithm Evaluation

Emanuele Ruffaldi¹, Dan Morris², Timothy Edmunds³, Dinesh Pai³, and Federico Barbagli^2
1PERCRO, Scuola Superiore S. Anna
²Computer Science Department, Stanford University
³Computer Science Department, Rutgers University
pit@sssup.it, {dmorris,barbagli}@robotics.stanford.edu, {tedmunds,dpai}@cs.rutgers.edu

Overview

This page hosts the public data repository described in our 2006 Haptics Symposium paper: Standardized Evaluation of Haptic Rendering Systems.

The goal of this repository is threefold:

• To provide publicly-available data sets that describe the forces resulting when a probe is scanned over the surface of several physical objects, along with models of those objects. This data can serve as a "gold standard" for haptic rendering algorithms, providing the "correct" stream of forces that should result from a particular scanning trajectory.
  
  
• To provide a standard set of analyses that can be performed on particular implementations of haptic rendering algorithms, allowing objective and standardized evaluations of those algorithms.
  
  
• To present the results of these analyses collected from several publicly-available implementations of haptic rendering algorithms, as reference data and as examples of potential applications of these data sets.
  
  

Data Processing Pipeline

Physical models are scanned and used for analysis of haptic rendering techniques according to the following pipeline; we use the term trajectory to refer to a stream of positions and forces.

• Scanning: The HAVEN at Rutgers University is used to scan several aspects of a physical model. First, the object is scanned with a laser range scanner to obtain a precise polygonal model of the surface. An optically-tracked force sensor is then scanned manually across the surface of the object, providing position and orientation information that is time-referenced to force and torque data. We call this recorded trajectory a raw trajectory.
  
  
• Out-trajectory generation: We can determine when our scanning probe was in contact with the object using normal force informaiton. Whenever the probe was in contact with the object, the reported position data should contain points that lie on the surface of the object. However, due to small amounts of noise in our measurement, the recorded path deviates slightly from the surface of the object. We therefore project this trajectory onto the surface of the object whenever the force data confirms that the probe was in contact with the object. We call this slightly- modified trajectory an out-trajectory.
  
  
• In-trajectory generation: Haptic rendering systems often depend on allowing a haptic probe to penetrate the surface of a rigid object before penalty forces are applied to the haptic device. The data collected from the physical scan of a rigid object contains normal forces and a trajectory that lies entirely on the surface of the object. We therefore analytically compute a trajectory that moves below the surface of the object that - if passed as input to an ideal haptic rendering algorithm, would apply the same forces to the haptic device that we measured in our physical scan, and would graphically present a surface contact point that corresponds to the trajectory we measured in our physical scan. We call this hypothetical trajectory an in-trajectory.
  
  
• Haptic rendering: This in-trajectory can then be fed to any haptic rendering algorithm, in place of the position data that would typically come from a haptic device. The haptic rendering algorithm will generate a stream of forces (which would typically be applied to a haptic device) and - generally - a surface contact position (which would typically be rendered graphically). We call this trajectory a rendered trajectory.
  

Data Formats

This section describes the data formats in which all files on this page are presented.

• Mesh files, representing scanned object geometry, will be presented in .obj format. Meshes will be in the same reference frame as the corresponding data files.
  
  
• Trajectory files are presented as .traj files, tab-delimited ASCII files containing position and force data, plus associated metadata.
  
  The first section of a .traj file contains comments and metadata; each line begins with '#' and may contain one metadatafield, of the format:
  

  
  [field name]=[field value]
  

  
  A field value extends from the '=' to the end of the line, and is generally a single number but may be text for some fields. The metadata portion of the file is terminated with the token DATA_START; all subsequent lines contain trajectory data.
  
  A typical header looks like:
  

  
  # points=31800
  # columns=8
  # column_labels=time(s) X(mm) Y(mm) Z(mm) Fx(N) Fy(N) Fz(N) ctime(s)
  # DATA_START
  

  
  This indicates that the field contains 31800 data points organized in 8 columns, labeled according to the field 'column_labels'. Other fields may appear in a data file to indicate particular parameters that were used to generate that file.
  
  The data portion of the file is tab-delimited and formatted according to:
  

  
  [time] [x] [y] [z] [Fx] [Fy] [Fz] [computation time] [...optional orientation fields...] [...optional torque fields...]
  

  
  The "time offset" metadata field is for interal debugging only; it is not meaningful to other users of this data.
  
  The "computation time" data field is meaningful only for computational results; it indicates how much time was spent computing this particular data point (i.e. it excludes time related to disk i/o, graphic rendering, etc.).
  
  

Data Sets

This section contains several data sets acquired with our scanner and processed with the pipeline described above. Data is specified in the .traj format defined above. Note that the forces in an "in-trajectory" file are defined to be zero, and the normal forces in an "out-trajectory" file are defined to be one or zero, representing contact or non-contact with the object surface.

plane0.zip (400KB) contains the trajectory files describe above, for a simple plane. The following files are included: probe.traj: the raw trajectory out.traj: the out-trajectory in.traj: the in-trajectory, computed using a stiffness of .5N/mm proxy.traj: the rendered trajectory, computed using the proxy algorithm as implemented in CHAI 1.25 potential.traj: the rendered trajectory, computed using a potential-field algorithm that applies a penalty force to the nearest surface point at each iteration plane_4.obj: a mesh representing the plane

duck0.zip (3MB) contains the trajectory files describe above, for a model of a duck. The following files are included: probe.traj: the raw trajectory out_9k.traj: the out-trajectory in_9k.traj: the in-trajectory, computed using a stiffness of .5N/mm proxy_9k.traj: the rendered trajectory, computed using the proxy algorithm as implemented in CHAI 1.25 potential_9k.traj: the rendered trajectory, computed using a potential-field algorithm that applies a penalty force to the nearest surface point at each iteration duck001_9k.obj: a mesh representing the duck

Code

This section contains utility code used to process our data formats, and will later be updated to include example analyses. Also see CHAI 3D for the haptic and graphic rendering code used for our analyses.

• read_traj_file.m, a Matlab function for reading the contents of a .traj file, including all data and metadata.
• plot_trajectories.m, a Matlab script for graphing the positions and forces presented in a series of .traj files. Uses the previous function (read_traj_file) for file input.
  
  The output of this function, when run on the plane data set provided above, looks like this (click for a larger image):
  
  

Example Analyses

This section contains several analyses performed using the above data. The results presented here serve as reference data for comparison to other algorithms/implementations, and the approaches presented here provide examples of potential applications for this repository.

1. Friction Identification

The duck model and trajectories provided above were used to find the optimal (most realistic) coefficient of dynamic friction for haptic rendering of this object. This analysis uses the friction cone algorithm available in CHAI 3D (version 1.31). The in-trajectory derived from the physical-scanned (raw) trajectory is fed to CHAI for rendering, and the resulting forces are compared to the physically-scanned forces. The coefficient of dynamic friction is iteratively adjusted until a minimum error between the physical and rendered forces is achieved.

This analysis demonstrates the use of our repository for improving the realism of a haptic rendering system, and also quantifies the value of using friction in a haptic simulation, in terms of mean-squared-force-error.

Results for the no-friction and optimized-friction cases follow, including the relative computational cost in floating-point operations:

• duck_friction_example.zip (400KB) contains all the files used for this analysis:
  
  • raw-Back.traj: the raw trajectory (a subset of the above duck trajectory, collected on the "back" of the duck)
  • out-Back-3.traj: the out-trajectory
  • in-Back-3.traj: the in-trajectory, computed using a stiffness of .5N/mm
  • proxy-Back-3-friction.traj: the rendered trajectory, computed using the proxy algorithm as implemented in CHAI 1.31 and a dynamic friction radius of 0.3008mm (the optimized value obtained from the iterative process described above)
  • proxy-Back-3-flat.traj: the rendered trajectory, computed using the same proxy but no friction
  • duck001_3k.obj: a mesh representing the duck, reduced to 3000 polygons for faster computation (used for all of these trajectories)

• duck_voxel_example.zip (400KB) contains all the files used for this analysis:
  
  • raw-Back.traj: the raw trajectory (a subset of the above duck trajectory, collected on the "back" of the duck)
  • out-Back-3.traj: the out-trajectory
  • in-Back-3.traj: the in-trajectory, computed using a stiffness of .5N/mm
  • proxy-Back-3-flat.traj: the rendered trajectory, computed using the proxy algorithm
  • voxel32-Back-3.traj: the rendered trajectory, computed using the voxel-based algorithm with 32³ voxels
  • voxel64-Back-3.traj: the rendered trajectory, computed using the voxel-based algorithm with 64³ voxels
  • duck001_3k.obj: a mesh representing the duck, reduced to 3000 polygons for faster computation (used for all of these trajectories)

• duck_shading_example.zip (7MB) contains all the files used for this analysis:
  
  • probe-Back.traj: the raw trajectory (a subset of the above duck trajectory, collected on the "back" of the duck)
  • out-Back-projected-*.traj: the out-trajectory for each of the polygon-reduced versions of the duck
  • in-Back-projected-*.traj: the in-trajectory for each of the polygon-reduced versions of the duck
  • proxy-Back-projected-*-flat.traj: the rendered trajectory for each of the polygon-reduced versions of the duck, with shading disabled
  • proxy-Back-projected-*-shade.traj: the rendered trajectory for each of the polygon-reduced versions of the duck, with shading ensabled
  • duck001_*.obj: a mesh file for each of the polygon-reduced versions of the duck model

User Contributions

We hope to significantly expand the data sets available here over the coming months, and we welcome any of the following from users of this repository:

• Additional analyses performed using these data sets to evaluate specific haptic rendering algorithms or implementations
• Additional metrics that we can use to evaluate haptic trajectories (in place of our mean-squared-force-error metric), ideally (but not necessarily) implemented in Matlab
• Additional rendering algorithms, ideally (but not necessarily) implemented as subclasses of CHAI's proxy, on which we can run evaluations using our trajectories
• Additional data that you may be able to collect from a similar scanning apparatus

Contact

Please email us with any contributions, questions, or to discuss the data presented here. We welcome any information you have about how you're using this data or how it could be made more useful.