Protecting the PHANToM from the Programmer

Anytime you connect motors and amplifiers to a computer, you make it possible for the computer to break something or hurt someone. However, careful design of hardware and software can permit full use of a device within limits imposed by safety concerns. It is trivial to cause one such device, the Phantom ( Massie and Salisbury '94) from SensAble Technologies, to damage itself and in fact it is quite difficult not to do so. In this paper, we describe a robust solution to this problem.