This paper describes a haptic simulator that has been developed as an aid for the sensorimotor skill acquisition in dentistry. An important feature of the simulator is the ability to generate templates of position and force trajectories for the students to follow. Furthermore, the simulator has a mechanism, haptic playback, to help the students follow and learn these templates. Using this feature, the teacher can perform a procedure in the haptic simulator and record her actions. The trainee is then able to observe the recorded procedure and follow the correct trajectory in the position and force. Several haptic playback techniques are reviewed and the procedure implemented in the simulator is described in detail. We also describe hardware and software components of the simulator and their functionality.We conclude by describing the results of a preliminary classroom evaluation of the simulator.

Existing penalty-based haptic rendering approaches compute penetration depth in strictly translational sense and cannot properly take object rotation into account. We aim to provide a theoretical foundation for computing the penetration depth on the group of rigid-body motions SE(3). We propose a penalty-based six-degrees-of-freedom (6-DOF) haptic rendering algorithm based on determining the closestpoint projection of the inadmissible configuration onto the set of admissible configurations. Energy is used to define the metric on the configuration space. Once the projection is found the 6-DOF wrench can be computed. The configuration space is locally represented with exponential coordinates to make the algorithm more efficient. Numerical examples compare the proposed algorithm with the existing approaches and show its advantages.