Force Smoothing

The haptic device does not react well to the forces sent by the project. According to the haptics documentation, buzzing occurs when the haptic device can't render the forces. This can occur when the force is too high, there direction changes or the difference between forces is too great. The documentation recommends smoothing the forces.

Force with STL

The SWIFT collision detection package has a funtion that returns the normal vector between two objects. This can be used as the direction of the force vector. The distance between the objects is returned as well. The smoothing will keep track of past forces and take an average of the forces. Weights will be adjusted to ensure a smooth performance.

Force with octree

The force vector will be in the opposite direction of motion. The negative of the velocity vector is used to simulate resistance when contacting a cell.

A possible enhancement to this technique is adding a counter to the cells. Currently a cell is removed the first time contact is made with the tooltip. The counter could be used to remove the cell only when the counter reaches a certain limit. This would delay the removal and allow the force to be rendered for a longer time.