A two-fingered force feedback glove using soft actuators

Existing force feedback gloves mainly adopt rigid actuators such as electric motors and pneumatic cylinders, which have limitations including safety issues, heavyweight, and complex transmission mechanisms. In this paper, we introduce a light-weighted force-feedback glove using pneumatic-driven soft actuators. Based on the unilateral deformable features of the strain-limiting layer in the soft actuator, the dorsal-side mounting solution along with a light-weighted linkage mechanism is proposed to produce fingertip force feedback. We applied a pre-deformation of the soft actuator to enable the back drivability and the free space sensation. We then implemented a physical prototype of a two-fingered glove. Experimental results show that the glove could achieve considerable performance in free space with small frictional force (0.58N in maximum). While simulating the constrained space, the fingertip force reaches up to 2.1N. For the future work, we plan to improve the current solution to five fingers with finger position tracking and distributed tactile sensing on the palm.