A pneumatic-driven haptic glove with force and tactile feedback

The advent of Oculus Rift indicates the start of a booming era of virtual reality. In order to increase the immersive feeling of interaction with the virtual world, haptic devices allow us to touch and manipulate virtual objects in an intuitive way. In this paper, we introduce a portable and low-cost haptic glove that provides both force and tactile feedback using a direct-control pneumatic concept. To produce force feedback, two inlet ports of a double acting pneumatic cylinder are opened and closed via solenoid DC valves through Pulse-width modulation (PWM) technique. For tactile feedback, an air bladder is actuated using a diaphragm pump via PWM operated solenoid valve. Experiments on a single finger prototype validated that the glove can provide force and tactile feedback with sufficient moving range of the finger joints. The maximum continuous force is 9 Newton and the response time is less than 400ms. The glove is light weighted and easy to be mounted on the index finger. The proposed glove could be potentially used for virtual reality grasping scenarios and for teleoperation of a robotic hand for handling hazardous objects.