Vibrotactile fingertip feedback is easier to interpret than sounds in robot teleoperation
Evaluating Lightweight Contact Feedback in Dual-Operator Collaborative Humanoid Teleoperation
RoboticsHuman-Computer Interaction
Summary
When two people control robots together to move objects, they usually can’t feel when the robot’s fingers touch something. The authors created a system that sends quick vibrations or sounds to the operators to let them know when contact happens. They found that operators understood the vibration signals better than the sounds, but these signals didn’t clearly speed up or improve the task. Practice helped people get better at the task more than the feedback type did.
What this means in practice
- •For robotic teleoperation teams: Use fingertip vibrations to improve operators’ awareness of robot contact during collaborative tasks with humanoid robots.
- •For virtual reality developers: Design more intuitive feedback systems by prioritizing vibrotactile cues over auditory ones for touch awareness in extended reality control setups.
Authors
Austin Graves, Chuizheng Kong, Yunho Cho, Yuanshao Yang, Advaith Nidumukkala, Shreyas Kousik, Mohsen Moghaddam
Abstract
Dual-operator humanoid teleoperation enables collaborative manipulation through two separate robots, but operators lack direct awareness of robot-object contact that is normally available during physical interaction. To address this, we present eXtended Reality Teleoperation (XRT), an extended reality teleoperation framework that returns a robot's fingertip contact through lightweight vibrotactile and/or auditory feedback, and a synchronized dual-humanoid testbed built on it for two operators. Sixteen dyads performed a collaborative crate lift-and-flip under vision only and the three feedback conditions in a counterbalanced within-subject design with verified feedback-channel delivery. Three results follow. First, operators rated our finger-localized vibrotactile display as more effective than our open-ear sonification: all 32 ranked it above the sonification, 18 ranked it most effective, and its cues were rated far easier to perceive and interpret than the auditory cues. Second, completion time, failures, workload, discomfort, and partner awareness showed no detected condition differences, with wide completion-time intervals and smaller meaningful effects unresolved. Third, performance changed substantially with practice, especially on the harder flip-over task: completion time improved across blocks, and attempt-to-attempt variation within a dyad (SD x1.51) was larger than the largest condition contrast (x1.16). Exploratory analyses detected no difference in immediate grip or motion responses between feedback conditions. For novice collaborative teleoperation, our fingertip vibrotactile cues were rated more effective and easier to interpret than our auditory cues, while their effect on task performance remains unresolved.