I spent most of my working life in haptics, from January 2nd, 1998 to my retirement in 2020. It could have been January 1st, 1998, but my boss did not want to start paying me on a Sunday, because that is not a working day.
This was an internal move on my part from the Space division of the now defunct Fokker Aircraft company to its erstwhile flight simulation division, called FCS for "Fokker Control Systems".
The Fokker flight simulation division was the global standard and market leader in so-called "control loading", the simulation of the aerodynamic forces on the control column and foot pedals in a flight simulator cockpit. For a short while, this 20 person group was the only entity in the 10,000 people Fokker organization that actually turned a profit.
I was hired as the first employee of a planned new medical branch of this small division. My initial task was to finish a few ongoing demo projects.
The simplest and most successful of these was a set of two push-pull trocars, connected in a symmetrical master-slave fashion by the so called "FCS control loop".
To our never ending frustration, visitors to our booths at trade shows were suitably impressed by the incredible directness and quality of the coupling between the two trocars, then going on to say that apparently this could be done in one direction, but that it would obviously never be possible in more than one degree of freedom.
Out of our frustration grew the need for a 3-DOF demo. This became the Haptic Master.
The HM was never intended as a product. It was just my 3D master-slave demo. Hence the name, which by the way I never liked, because to me tghe Haptic Master was really the prototype for a haptic VR display, with the one-on-one master-slave possibility between two identical devices quite obvious but not very relevant.
The HM however acquired a life of its own. People wanted to buy it for rehab purposes even before it was finished. When I protested that it was just my 3D demo, they would not listen.
The rest is history, which is told in a separate section on the Haptic Master elsewhere. History repeats itself. For a short while, the haptics group was the only part of the FCS company that actually turned a profit.
The profit that came from the haptics group was not real. Soon after I started the group, it was made clear to me that the company had pivoted again. They were now going into 6-DOF motion platforms, and into cars.
I was told in no uncertain terms, including a comparison with the weaning of piglets, that from now I would have to fend for myself. Fortunately, I had quickly become adept at participating in national and European research projects, and getting parallel funding for my own pet projects in this way.
Since we were working on really fun things, not making any real money, and seemed to be enjoying ourselves immensely, my little department became known as "the playground". At one time I received a formal complaint to management by an especially stodgy colleague that we were laughing too often, and too loudly.
This is a complaint that has followed me around ever since my days in the Zero-G department at Fokker Space, so there must be some truth in it. To all those offended : I am so sorry.
One of the projects that kept the department afloat, and gave interesting results was the coupling of a pair of Haptic Masters into a "single" 6-DOF device, in a project on car clay modelling for Pininfarina and others with the Politecnico di Milano.
The real plan for the FCS "medical" group as it was called, was to find out if the FCS control loop would also work on smaller devices, on the scale of medical tools like forcepses and scalpels.
FCS management were no fools. They had a very valid concern here, and in retrospect I think that we found maybe the only application for the FCS control loop, or "admittance control" as it was by then coming to be called, in all of medical simulation. This was the Simodont dental trainer.
See Armbot