Providing navigation assistance through ForceHand: a wearable forcefeedback glove Conveying information through forcefeedback has multiple advantages as compared to auditory or visual information transfer. Kinesthetic senses, in general, have shown enormous importance in human communication and to the very experience of being human. Kinesthetic learners tend to learn complex tasks through forcefeedback and tactile sensations, in much lesser time as compared to auditory and visual learners. Navigation cues provided through forcefeedback could eliminate the need for intensively engaging oneself to mobile devices. This type of feedback cue could also eliminate the need for auditory and visual engagement of the user, which can help sustained awareness of the proximity. This paper attempts the realization of a navigation assistant using a forcefeedback glove enabled with lowpressure pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs). This glove enables the user to receive navigation cues through forcefeedback on the forearm. We used a gaming environment to evaluate the feasibility of using the glove as a navigation assistant. The gaming experiment also provided vast subjective feedback. 89.5% of the participants chose forcefeedback as their most preferred type of cue. In addition, an experiment was carried out to identify the optimum resolution of input air pressure that could be successfully differentiated by the users. The average % accuracy in identifying the correct larger force from pairs of forces was found to be 97.6%, 89.2%, 80.8%, and 75.6%, respectively, for resolutions of 20, 15, 10, and 5kPa.

HumanRobot Interaction Through Fingertip Haptic Devices for Cooperative Manipulation Tasks Teleoperation of multirobot systems, e.g. dual manipulators, in cooperative manipulation tasks requires haptic feedback of multicontact interaction forces. Classical haptic devices restrict the workspace of the human operator and provide only one contact point. An alternative solution is to enable the operator to command the robot system via freehand motions which extends the workspace of the human. In such a setting, a multicontact haptic feedback may be provided to the human through multiple wearable haptic devices, e.g. fingertip devices that display forces on the human fingertips. In this paper we evaluate the benefit of using wearable haptic fingertip devices to interact with a bimanual robot setup in a pickandplace manipulation task. We show that haptic feedback through wearable devices improves task performance compared to the base condition of no haptic feedback. Therefore, wearable haptic devices are a promising interface for guidance of multirobot manipulation systems.