Low-Cost Teleoperation with Haptic Feedback through Vision-based Tactile Sensors for Rigid and Soft Object Manipulation

Haptic feedback is essential for humans to successfully perform complex and delicate manipulation tasks. A recent rise in tactile sensors has enabled robots to leverage the sense of touch and expand their capability drastically. However, many tasks still need human intervention/guidance. For this reason, we present a teleoperation framework designed to provide haptic feedback to human operators based on the data from camera-based tactile sensors mounted on the robot gripper. Partial autonomy is introduced to prevent slippage of grasped objects during task execution. Notably, we rely exclusively on low-cost off-the-shelf hardware to realize an affordable solution. We demonstrate the versatility of the framework on nine different objects ranging from rigid to soft and fragile ones, using three different operators on real hardware.