Haptic Simulation of a Gear Selector Lever Using Artificial Potential Fields

In this paper, we address the problem of haptic simulation of a gear selector lever using a two degrees–of–freedom mechatronic lever. To reproduce the behavior of a customary gearshift, we propose suitable virtual artificial potential fields that generate the desired force profiles. The artificial potential functions are based on generalized sigmoid functions and contain parameters that have intuitive physical meaning and that can be easily adjusted to change the force sensations fed to the user. To validate our approach experiments have been carried out.