HapCompass: A Rotational Haptic Device for Contact-Rich Robotic Teleoperation
This addresses the problem of limited haptic feedback in teleoperation for robotic manipulation, offering a novel device that improves task performance and data quality for imitation learning, though it is incremental in advancing haptic interface technology.
The paper tackled the challenge of providing intuitive directional haptic feedback for contact-rich robotic teleoperation by proposing HapCompass, a low-cost wearable device that rotates a linear resonant actuator to render 2D directional cues, resulting in increased success rates, decreased completion times, and reduced maximum contact forces compared to baselines.
The contact-rich nature of manipulation makes it a significant challenge for robotic teleoperation. While haptic feedback is critical for contact-rich tasks, providing intuitive directional cues within wearable teleoperation interfaces remains a bottleneck. Existing solutions, such as non-directional vibrations from handheld controllers, provide limited information, while vibrotactile arrays are prone to perceptual interference. To address these limitations, we propose HapCompass, a novel, low-cost wearable haptic device that renders 2D directional cues by mechanically rotating a single linear resonant actuator (LRA). We evaluated HapCompass's ability to convey directional cues to human operators and showed that it increased the success rate, decreased the completion time and the maximum contact force for teleoperated manipulation tasks when compared to vision-only and non-directional feedback baselines. Furthermore, we conducted a preliminary imitation-learning evaluation, suggesting that the directional feedback provided by HapCompass enhances the quality of demonstration data and, in turn, the trained policy. We release the design of the HapCompass device along with the code that implements our teleoperation interface: https://ripl.github.io/HapCompass/.