Evaluation of Tactile Feedback for Teleoperated Glove-Based Interaction Tasks

This paper investigates the use of haptic feedback for glove-based teleoperation in interaction tasks. In particular, tactile feedback is provided to the operator’s fingers to render the force applied to the robot end-effector through the WEART TouchDIVER glove, together with visual feedback. The provided feedback is proportional to the interaction force between the robot and the environment during the execution of a teleoperation assembly task, making the operator able to feel the established interaction. Experiments, involving a remote assembly task, have been performed with and without (i.e., only making use of the visual feedback) the haptic feedback to assess its usefulness. The obtained results show the improved performance of the teleoperation task in terms of both success rate and human perception, suggesting the importance of tactile feedback in interaction tasks with glove-based teleoperation.