Main Trends and Promising Solutions in Haptics

The main objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive and highly structured review of promising research and commercial solutions in haptics. The subject of the presented review is small- and human-sized haptic devices, emerged mainly in the past ten years. This paper consists of three main sections. First section provides classification of haptic systems. Two classification criteria are considered. The first criterion is the kinematics type of the haptic device and the other is the principle of interaction of the device's mechanical parts and human operator. Based on the suggested classification, four categories of haptic devices is presented: continuous devices, parallel devices, exoskeleton devices and combined devices. The second section provides a review of research and commercially available haptic devices developed for general and special usage. The final section provides generalized conclusions.