Circumferential Scissor Spring Enhances Precision in Hand Controllers

Innovators at NASA’s Johnson Space Center have designed a circumferential scissor spring mechanism, that when incorporated into a hand controller, improves the restorative force to a control stick’s neutral position. The design also provides for operation on a more linear portion of the spring’s force deflection curve, yielding better feedback to the user. Physical hand controllers, such as translational and rotational controllers, use a non-circumferential scissor spring arrangement to return the control stick to a neutral position, but the linear response of a typical scissor spring arrangement can reduce a user’s sense of control by allowing slack between deflections.