Tactus glove senses touch and hand pose for natural dexterity data
Tactus: Tactile & Pose Sensing Glove for Natural Dexterity Data Collection
RoboticsArtificial IntelligenceHardware ArchitectureMachine Learning
Summary
Collecting natural hand movements with precise touch and hand position data is important for making robots that can handle objects like humans. The authors created Tactus, a special glove that is thin and fits closely to the hand without interfering with how people normally move. It has sensors that measure touch forces where hands mostly contact objects and tracks hand movements accurately even when parts are hidden during manipulation. Tactus was tested to detect very light forces better than other gloves and to track hand positions well during complex tasks. This helps record detailed hand-object interactions to improve robot skills and models.
What this means in practice
- •For robotics engineers: Collect high-quality hand manipulation data with precise force and pose measurements to improve robot control and world modeling.
- •For prosthetics developers: Use detailed tactile and pose data to design prosthetic hands that better mimic natural touch and manipulation.
Authors
Li Guan, Rachael Granberry, Sahar Aseeri, Sahar Rostami, Taylor Niehues, Sai Dhanooshi Marri, Mia Huang, Dingtian Zhang, Ziyi Kou, Jason Pursel, Eric Whitmire, Vatsal Mehta, Ashish Deshpande, Tristan Trutna, Reed Belcher, Emelia Black, Julian Blake, Roger Boldu, Sean Bonaventure, Einar Boyovich, Jordan Brennan, Elizabeth Casillas, David Christensen, Tyler Christensen, Nicholas Colonnese, Stuart Dealey, Gaige DeHaven, Katie Doran, Chris Doughty, Robert Drury, Silvia Espino, Gabriel Geyne, Beth Goodrich, Kyra Gould, Joe Grisso, Susana Guerrero, Andrew Gwozdziowski, Monica Ha, Ehsan Hajiesmaili, Kate Healy, Rose Hope, Michael Hurst, Claire Ikemiya, Daisy Isibor, Rick James, Yashasvi Joginapally, Samuel Johnson, Tyler Jorgensen, Kristy Jost, Ben Kamath, Slava Karulin, Alexander Keener, Woo Kim, Alison Krauskopf, Ankit Kumar, Joshua Lang, Lizzy Li, Cameron Lynch, Daniel Ma, Hector Martinon, Christina Matos, Keagan McCurdy, Lee Mincey, Stuart Nezlek, Tiffany Nguyen, James O'Hara, Jason Osborne, Jacky Pai, Roham Pardakhtim, David Perek, Alexandre Poulin, Nick Raines, Salwa Rasheed, Leah Resneck, Kevin Rhodes, Ergys Ristani, Douglas Roberts, Anik Sarker, Harrison Scarborough, Jonas Schmidtler, Brian Shieh, Benjamin Shuman, Garrett Simard, Forrest Smith, Udara Somarathna, Eliot Sosin, Jonathan Stewart, Kristine Strom, Adam Swett, Hal Talbot-Mantooth, Julia Tanner, Sai Sharan Thirunagari, Curtis Torrey, Simge Uzun, Eileen Wachs, Rylan Wasson, Henry Wei, Jesse White, Beau Woodbyrne, Antonio Woods, Noah Young, Chandler Yount, Joseph Zhang, Sean Keller
Abstract
Collecting naturalistic human manipulation demonstrations with accurate contact force and hand pose is essential for robot dexterous manipulation policy and foundational world model learning - yet no existing wearable platform provides both calibrated fingertip force sensing and occlusion-resilient hand tracking in a form factor that preserves natural manipulation behavior. We present Tactus, a textile-integrated sensing glove that co-optimizes three design pillars: (1) a thin, conformal 3D-knit form factor (1.5 mm fingertip stackup) designed to minimize interference with natural manipulation, (2) strategically placed capacitive tactile sensors at manipulation-relevant regions informed by empirical contact studies, and (3) IMU-fused pose tracking that maintains accuracy through the hand-object occlusions where manipulation data is most valuable. Tactus includes a documented calibration pipeline for cross-glove consistency and per-session calibration for subject-dependent correction. To enable objective comparison, we introduce standardized benchmarking protocols for tactile force regression and hand pose estimation, and apply them to Tactus and two commercially available tactile gloves - to our knowledge the first quantitative cross-platform evaluation of this kind. Tactus resolves a minimum detectable force of 0.59 N at 95% confidence, 1.6 - 2.7x lower than the commercial baselines, and with 0.87 cross-participant consistency, while our pose tracking sustains 11.0 mm fingertip keypoint relative error during manipulation, when occlusion is heaviest. We show that these combined signals support object property estimation, slip detection, and representative recording of hand-object interaction - yielding demonstration data with the fidelity required for contact-aware manipulation policies and world models.