The N2D Haptic Glove: A Multi-Finger Glove for 2D Directional Force Feedback for Contact Rich Manipulation

Abstract:Humans rely on directional fingertip forces to probe and regulate contact during manipulation, yet most wearable haptic gloves render only vibration or single-axis force, leaving force direction ambiguous. Without directional cues, users must infer contact force from vision alone, often leading to over-pressing, inconsistent control, and reduced precision in robotic teleoperation. We present the N2D Haptic Glove, a multi-finger wearable device that renders planar flexion-extension fingertip forces using capstan-drive transmissions for high-transparency force feedback. Through benchtop validations and a user study involving haptic teleoperation of a robotic arm and hand, we demonstrate that compared to visual-only and single-axis haptic baselines, planar fingertip feedback significantly reduces contact force error during precise manipulation, improves trial-to-trial consistency, and enhances overall user experience in axial probing tasks. These findings establish the N2D Haptic Glove and directional finger-based haptics devices as a promising modality for contact-rich teleoperation, immersive virtual reality simulations, and robot learning from demonstrations. N2D Haptic Glove's hardware and software system will be fully open-sourced at \href{this https URL}{this https URL}.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2606.14083 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2606.14083v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.14083 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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