HapCompass: A Rotational Haptic Device for Contact-Rich Robotic Teleoperation

TL;DR

HapCompass is a low-cost wearable haptic device that provides directional feedback for robotic teleoperation, improving task success, efficiency, and demonstration quality.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mechanically rotating linear resonant actuator to deliver intuitive directional cues in wearable teleoperation interfaces.

Findings

HapCompass increased success rate in manipulation tasks.

It decreased task completion time and contact force.

Directional feedback improved imitation learning outcomes.

Abstract

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/.