Study of the Effectiveness of a Wearable Haptic Interface With Cutaneous and Vibrotactile Feedback for VR-Based Teleoperation

The control principle of teleoperated robotic systems is often not very intuitive, resulting in substantial cognitive load for the operator. Besides, the teleoperation of robotic systems requires stable and convenient visual feedback for the operator. Better spatio-temporal robot coordination can be achieved by providing the operator with high-fidelity multimodal haptic feedback. Using the advantages of virtual reality (VR) and haptic technology, we can improve the quality of teleoperation and increase the level of user involvement when operating the system. This article focuses on studying the effectiveness of the developed wearable haptic interface, vDeltaGlove, that provides multimodal haptic feedback when controlling a robotic arm through a virtual environment (VE). We evaluated the performance of vDeltaGlove in the series of teleoperation tasks. vDeltaGlove interface showed comparable characteristics with the Omega.7 desktop haptic device in terms of accuracy and outreached the performance of operation with VIVE controller. Besides, the developed interface showed the superior evaluation in terms of user experience. The proposed technology suggests a novel way of human-robot interaction (HRI) to achieve intuitive and immersive robot control.