Wearable Fluid Haptics for Enhanced Robotic Teleoperation with MANUS Quantum Metagloves

This paper presents the fabrication and evaluation of wearable fluid haptics that is designed to enhance robotic teleoperation. Due to the limited availability of compact and high-resolution tactile feedback for teleoperation, we fabricated a fluid haptic device that is compatible with the MANUS Quantum Metagloves and implemented a haptic rendering algorithm that translates DIGIT tactile images to useful tactile information. We then assessed the operator's ability to distinguish the different haptic stimuli through a psychophysical study and quantified the impact of this fluid haptic feedback through a comparative study of teleoperation tasks that used five objects of varying sizes and shapes. Results showed that the users have a good distinction between different haptic stimuli, and adding haptic feedback can affect the robotic teleoperation task completion time. For future work, we wanted to determine the impact of this fluid haptics in terms of task accuracy, and explore other complex teleoperation tasks such as grasping of delicate objects.