Evaluation of a Haptic-Actuated Glove for Remote Human-Robot Interaction (HRI): A Proof of Concept

Traditional teleoperation systems rely primarily on visual feedback, often via virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays, which may be insufficient in complex or dynamic environments, increasing the risk of collisions. Thus, haptic feedback was investigated to enhance Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) teleoperation by improving obstacle detection. The haptic feedback was provided to the operator using a glove equipped with two motors that gave tactile cues based on obstacle proximity. Thus, the glove applied low torques to the operator’s hand. Therefore, an experiment was conducted on 30 participants to observe the effect of the haptic-actuated glove. So, a dataset was gathered, and different metrics were computed from the data to evaluate participants’ awareness, control precision, and responsiveness. Hence, the results proved the advantages of controlling mobile robots in complex environments for high-precision applications, such as hazardous material handling, exploration, search, and rescue.