Touch-Linked Sleeve: A Haptic Interface for Augmented Tactile Perception in Robotic Teleoperation

Abstract

Tactile perception is crucial for robots to interact effectively with their environments, particularly in cluttered settings or when visual sensing is unavailable. However, a major limitation is the insufficient coverage of tactile sensors on current robots, which makes navigating cluttered spaces challenging due to the lack of capability to detect collisions. This limitation also hinders the use of teleoperation systems in such spaces by reducing the human operator’s situational awareness. To address this issue, this paper proposes the Touch-Linked Sleeve (TLS), a haptic mapping system that redirects contact on robot arms to human skin. The system consists of a tactile skin for contact detection and a haptic sleeve that enables human operators to experience telepresented contact. By establishing a transparent mapping between the robot’s tactile skin and the user’s haptic sleeve, operators can intuitively sense contacts from the robot’s perspective. To evaluate the system’s effectiveness, we conducted experiments demonstrating the functionality of both the tactile skin and the haptic sleeve. Moreover, we performed human studies using a virtual reality robot teleoperation interface to simulate navigation and manipulation in a cluttered scenario. The results indicate that the proposed system enhances perceptual transparency during object grasping tasks, leading to improved task completion times, fewer collisions, and improved overall usability.