A Natural Human-Robot Interaction System for Teleoperation Based on Noncontact Haptic Feedback

Abstract

In order to provide natural and immersive interactive experience for teleoperation in the context of human-robot collaboration and interaction, this work introduces a natural human-robot interaction system for teleoperation based on ultrasonic haptic feedback. Specifically, our system can accurately capture an operator's hand movements and replicate these actions on the remote robot with low latency and high fidelity. It utilizes an ultrasonic phased array to achieve non-contact haptic feedback. We propose a dynamic ultrasonic array acoustic field customization method based on interactive feature information image. This method can dynamically adjust the acoustic field according to the operator's hand characteristics, focus on multiple target points in real time, and project them onto an operator's fingertips, thereby providing force-controllable non-contact haptic feedback to the operator. The operator is integrated into the feedback loop of our system, controlling the system through multimodal feedback to form a high-quality human-in-the-loop closed control system. The system's performance is validated in two classic robotic tasks: block pick-and-place and nut-tightening. The experimental results show that the system exhibits excellent accuracy and dexterity, and can efficiently complete tasks with high accuracy while providing great interactive experience for operators.