MFE: A Multimodal Hand Exoskeleton with Interactive Force, Pressure and Thermo-haptic Feedback

TL;DR

The paper introduces MFE, a multimodal hand exoskeleton that delivers force, pressure, and thermal feedback to improve haptic communication in virtual reality and teleoperation.

Contribution

It presents a novel hand exoskeleton capable of providing integrated force, pressure, and thermal feedback, advancing multimodal haptic interfaces.

Findings

Participants recognized and manipulated deformable objects successfully.

Participants differentiated remote objects with different temperatures.

The system enhanced situational awareness and usability in teleoperation.

Abstract

Recent advancements in virtual reality and robotic teleoperation have greatly increased the variety of haptic information that must be conveyed to users. While existing haptic devices typically provide unimodal feedback to enhance situational awareness, a gap remains in their ability to deliver rich, multimodal sensory feedback encompassing force, pressure, and thermal sensations. To address this limitation, we present the Multimodal Feedback Exoskeleton (MFE), a hand exoskeleton designed to deliver hybrid haptic feedback. The MFE features 20 degrees of freedom for capturing hand pose. For force feedback, it employs an active mechanism capable of generating 3.5-8.1 N of pushing and pulling forces at the fingers' resting pose, enabling realistic interaction with deformable objects. The fingertips are equipped with flat actuators based on the electro-osmotic principle, providing pressure and vibration stimuli and achieving up to 2.47 kPa of contact pressure to render tactile sensations. For thermal feedback, the MFE integrates thermoelectric heat pumps capable of rendering temperatures from 10 to 55 degrees Celsius. We validated the MFE by integrating it into a robotic teleoperation system using the X-Arm 6 and Inspire Hand manipulator. In user studies, participants successfully recognized and manipulated deformable objects and differentiated remote objects with varying temperatures. These results demonstrate that the MFE enhances situational awareness, as well as the usability and transparency of robotic teleoperation systems.