A Wearable Haptic Sleeve Interface for Spaceflight Robotic Arm Operations

During spacecraft robotic arm operations, haptic feedback has the potential to display rich streams of relevant data to the user, such as trajectory information and velocity. One promising strategy to encode such information is through tactile stroke illusions, which create the sensation of vibration moving across the skin. This study highlights the design and feasibility testing of a haptic wearable interface worn on the user's forearm in a sleeve form factor that elicits tactile stroke illusions, using an array of vibration actuators in a timed sequence. By manipulating the temporal aspects and developing two rendering algorithms to convey end-effector movement information, we demonstrate the feasibility of our haptic sleeve wearable by human testing to measure how accurately participants perceive the conveyed information (trajectory and velocity).