CDF-Glove: A Cable-Driven Force Feedback Glove for Dexterous Teleoperation

TL;DR

CDF-Glove is an affordable, lightweight cable-driven force feedback glove that enhances dexterous teleoperation by providing real-time haptic feedback, significantly improving task success rates and enabling better imitation learning.

Contribution

The paper introduces CDF-Glove, a novel low-cost force feedback glove with validated control models, improving teleoperation performance and data collection for imitation learning.

Findings

Achieves 0.4° joint repeatability.

Provides 200 ms force feedback latency.

Increases task success rate by 4x with feedback.

Abstract

High-quality teleoperated demonstrations are a primary bottleneck for imitation learning (IL) in dexterous manipulation. However, haptic feedback provides operators with real-time contact information, enabling real-time finger posture adjustments, and thereby improving demonstration quality. Existing dexterous teleoperation platforms typically omit haptic feedback and remain bulky and expensive. We introduce CDF-Glove, a lightweight and low cost cable-driven force-feedback glove. The real-time state is available for 20 finger degrees of freedom (DoF), of which 16 are directly sensed and 4 are passively coupled (inferred from kinematic constraints). We develop a kinematic model and control stack for the glove, and validate them across multiple robotic hands with diverse kinematics and DoF. The CDF-Glove achieves distal joint repeatability of 0.4 degrees, and delivers about 200 ms force feedback latency, yielding a 4x improvement in task success rate relative to no-feedback teleoperation. We collect two bimanual teleoperation datasets, on which we train and evaluate Diffusion Policy baselines. Compared to kinesthetic teaching, the policies trained in our teleoperated demonstrations increase the average success rate by 55% and reduce the mean completion time by approximately 15.2 seconds (a 47.2% relative reduction). In particular, the CDF-Glove costs approximately US$230. The code and designs are released as open source at https://cdfglove.github.io/.