VibroBot: A Lightweight and Wirelessly Programmable Vibration Bot for Haptic Guidance

Cutaneous haptics is helpful to tame the human-machine mismatch by interactive tactile feedback and perform precise manipulations for virtual immersive interactions. However, wearable tactile gloves cover the palm and fingers greatly, thus reducing the tactile information from interactive objects and causing the inconsistency between virtual and practical operations. In this work, we design a lightweight finger-worn vibration bot, named VibroBot, to provide the individual vibrotactile feedback to each finger without compromising the hand dexterity. Each VibroBot, weighing only 2.9 grams, integrates components of the power, a wireless chip and a coil actuator, to receive programmable waveform signals and perform the real-time vibration feedback wirelessly on finger. Our design features six rapidly distinguishable vibration modes with the 96.4% recognition rate in 2.0 s, each guiding one of three finger joints for flexing or extending to a specified angular range. When worn on all five fingers, VibroBots can collaboratively guide the user with multi-dimension semantics, to adjust five fingers for target hand gestures at the same time. In virtual gesture training experiments, VibroBots were used to correct users' muscle memory bias for common gestures, and reduced the average gesture error from about 30<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^\circ$</tex-math></inline-formula> to less than 15<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^\circ$</tex-math></inline-formula>. Haptic guidance by VibroBots shows its potential in various Tactile Internet scenarios that require a large number of pretrained hand operations, such as robotic teleoperation and virtual surgical training.