More particularly in the medical field, gesture quality is primordial. Professionals have to follow
hands-on trainings to acquire a sufficient level of skills in the call of duty. For a decade, computer
based simulators have helped the learners in numerous learnings, but these simulations still have
to be associated with hands-on trainings on manikins, animals or cadavers, even if they do not
always provide a sufficient level of realism and they are costly in the long term. Therefore, their
training period has to finish on real patients, which is risky. Haptic simulators (furnishing an effort
feeling) are becoming a more appropriated solution as they can reproduce realist efforts applied by
organs onto the tools and they can provide countless prerecorded use cases. However, learning
alone on a simulator is not always efficient compared to a fellowship training (or supervised
training) where the instructor and the trainee manipulate together the same tools.
Thus, this study introduces an haptic system for supervised hands-on training: the instructor and
the trainee interoperate through their own haptic interface. They collaborate either with a real tool
dived into a real environment (the tool is handled by a robotic arm), or with a virtual
tool/environment. An energetic approach, using in particular the port-Hamiltonian modelling, has
been used to ensure the stability and the robustness of the system. This system has been
designed and validated experimentally on a one degree of freedom haptic interface. A comparative
study with two other dual-user haptic systems (in simulation) showed the interest of this new
architecture for hands-on training. In order to use this system when both users are away from each
other, this study proposes some enhancements to cope with constant communication time delays,
but they are not optimized yet.
