Characterisation of the Novint Falcon Haptic Device for Application as a Robot Manipulator

Abstract

The Falcon is a relatively inexpensive 3-DOF haptic device made by Novint for the gaming industry. The controller uses a form similar to that of the delta-robot configuration and because of this form, makes an interesting apparatus for research into control and estimation problems for robots involving parallel linkages. This paper presents the results of work conducted by the Autonomous Systems Lab at CSIRO in characterising the Falcon’s geometric, inertial and actuation properties for application to future model-based robotic algorithm development. Some comments are made towards assessing the Falcon’s suitability as an easily accessible research platform for these tasks. The aim of the paper is the presentation of the key kinematic and dynamic parameters for the device. 1