The Effect of Tactile Feedback on the Manipulation of a Remote Robotic Arm via a Haptic Glove

This paper investigates the effect of tactile feedback on the power efficiency and timing of controlling a remote robotic arm using a custom-built haptic glove. The glove integrates flex sensors to monitor finger movements and vibration motors to provide tactile feedback to the user. Communication with the robotic arm is established via the ESP-NOW protocol using an Arduino Nano ESP32 microcontroller (Arduino, Turin, Italy). This study examines the impact of tactile feedback on task performance by comparing precision, completion time, and power efficiency in object manipulation tasks with and without feedback. Experimental results demonstrate that tactile feedback significantly enhances the user’s control accuracy, reduces task execution time, and enables the user to control hand movement during object grasping scenarios precisely. It also highlights its importance in teleoperation systems. These findings have implications for improving human–robot interaction in remote manipulation scenarios, such as assistive robotics, remote surgery, and hazardous environment operations.