A Labor Of (G)Love: A Mini-Review of Haptic Glove- Controlled Robotic Hands in the ANA Avatar XPRIZE for Fine Telemanipulation

Virtual reality and motion retargeting have proven to be effective methods for realizing useful telepresence-the embodiment of remote robots for real-world manipulation tasks. While the virtual realm provides a simple and clean user interface (UI) to manipulate robot arm positioning, the most vital aspect of real-world manipulation, the end-of-arm-tooling, often lacks similar ease in usage. This problem is exacerbated in anthropomorphized robotic hands; controlling these high Degree-of-Freedom systems is often restricted by the utilization of simple handheld virtual reality controllers. More sophisticated solutions, such as the employment of motion capture gloves, utilize digital recreation of the operator's hands in the virtual environment to retarget their finger motions onto a robot hand. While this solution demonstrates finer control with less user effort, the gloves employed often lack force feedback hardware. Of those with haptics, the feedback is often limited, unidimensional, and/or unidirectional. Thus, a teleoperator does not experience genuine tactile reality through the robot, hindering their ability to telemanipulate objects. Regardless of the approach used, the underlying problem is clear: not reasonably priced, contemporary, commercially available device provides satisfactory haptic feedback for the proprioceptive control of humanoid robotic hands. This article reviews common commercial-off-the-shelf hardware and methods used to physically transport one's hand dexterity onto a robot during a contemporary international telepresence robotics competition, the ANA Avatar XPRIE. In addition, it reveals many successes and shortcomings had with state-of-the-art approaches.