Abstract
Haptic communication is a science that recreates the feeling of touch or tactile sensation, which can be controlled by computer applications allowing interaction. The users receive feedback through different vibrations or forces in form of felt sensations in specific parts of the human body, such as hands. Typically used for games, haptic communications take advantage of vibrating joysticks or controllers to enhance on-screen activity, allowing the user to feel the outcome of having depressed a button. However, it can be also used in many other fields.
The most sophisticated touch technology is found in industrial, military and medical applications, where training people for tasks that require hand-eye coordination is needed. For instance, in surgery, medical students are able to master delicate surgical techniques using a computer, whilst feeling the real sensation of dealing with muscles, suturing blood vessels or injecting Botox into a virtual face or body. Besides, it is widely used in teleoperation, where a human controls the movement of a device or a robot and, at the same time, a homologous unit is recreating the motion in real time. Once these techniques have been mastered in a near future, the medical industry will benefit from virtual surgeries that provide a revolutionary concept for medical care. Furthermore, haptic technology shall establish emergent industries that had not been feasible for the time being.
In order to achieve the transmission of data in haptic communications, we need a master/slave model where a device had control over one or several devices. Also known as primary/secondary model, both parts have to be connected via network, and in this communication, we have to deal with different challenges such as delay, jitter or packet loss, which cause troublesome effects on the system. Additionally, we have to consider that the error rate of the packet shall be increased by fading in wireless communications. In order to overcome these harsh effects, error correcting technologies are used, and, specifically in this thesis, some Forward Error Correction (FEC) techniques have been applied, such as BCH or LDPC codes. Moreover, multipath diversity methods will be used for the purpose of the enhancement of delay and reliability. In terms of delay, some techniques will have to be dismissed since they make impossible a real-time communication despite they exhibit good behavior against errors.
This thesis mainly focuses on studying, proposing and implementing new approaches of transmitting
