An active and passive combined gravity compensation approach for a hybrid force feedback device

When using a force feedback device to interact with a virtual world, the effect of immersion is highly dependent on its performance of gravity compensation. In this work, an active and passive combined gravity compensation approach is presented for a horizontally mounted 6-DOF hybrid force feedback device (HFFD-6). Both active and passive methods are analyzed with simulation and corresponding parameters in the passive approach are then optimized. And to evaluate the performance of the gravity compensation approach, physical experiments are also conducted to measure the gravity compensation errors in the workspace. Moreover, comparison studies are conducted to illustrate the superiority of the proposed approach in terms of output force capability. These experiments have demonstrated that the proposed approach is feasible to achieve gravity compensation and improve the output force capability of the device.