A Three-Fingered Force Feedback Glove Using Fiber-Reinforced Soft Bending Actuators

Force feedback gloves are promising for producing immersive haptic sensations in virtual reality systems or for intuitive control of remote robots in dexterous manipulation tasks. Existing gloves mainly adopt rigid actuators. In this article, we propose a force feedback glove using pneumatically powered fiber-reinforced soft bending actuators. Based on the unilateral deformable feature of the soft actuator, a dorsal-side mounted soft-rigid linkage mechanism is proposed to produce fingertip force feedback. We incorporated and experimentally determined a positive prebending deformation of the actuator to ensure small backdrive forces for simulating free-space sensation. To enable a large workspace of the glove, the soft-rigid linkage is synthesized to ensure full open/closure of the finger without any mechanical interference. Using a modular design concept, a three-fingered glove prototype is developed with a mass of 93.7 g. Experimental results show that the glove can provide distinct force feedback between free and constrained space. For free space, the maximum backdrive force is 0.48 N, while the fingertip force reaches up to 4.09 N for simulating the constrained space. Experiments also indicate that the glove is easy to put on/off. These results illustrate the feasibility of developing light-weighted force feedback gloves using fiber-reinforced soft bending actuators.