Abstract
This paper presents the effects of a virtual mass with a low-pass filter on the stability boundary of a virtual spring in the haptic system. In general, a haptic system consists of a haptic device, a sampler, a virtual impedance model and zero-order-hold. The virtual impedance is modeled as a virtual spring and a virtual mass. However the high-frequency noise due to the sampling time and the quantization error of sampled data may be generated when an acceleration is measured to compute the inertia force of the virtual mass. So a low-pass filter is needed to prevent the unstable behavior due to the high-frequency noise. A finite impulse response (FIR) filter is added to the measurement process of the acceleration and the effects on the haptic stability are simulated. According to the virtual mass with the FIR filter and the sampling time, the stability boundary of the virtual spring is analyzed through the simulation. The maximum available stiffness to guarantee the stable behavior is reduced, but simulation results still show that the stability boundary of the haptic system with the virtual mass is larger than that of the haptic system without the virtual mass.