The contact-rich nature of manipulation makes it a significant challenge for robotic teleoperation. While haptic feedback is critical for contact-rich tasks, providing intuitive directional cues within wearable teleoperation interfaces remains a bottleneck. Existing solutions, such as non-directional vibrations from handheld controllers, provide limited information, while vibrotactile arrays are prone to perceptual interference. To address these limitations, we propose HapCompass, a novel, low-cost wearable haptic device that renders 2D directional cues by mechanically rotating a single linear resonant actuator (LRA). We evaluated HapCompass's ability to convey directional cues to human operators and showed that it increased the success rate, decreased the completion time and the maximum contact force for teleoperated manipulation tasks when compared to vision-only and non-directional feedback baselines. Furthermore, we conducted a preliminary imitation-learning evaluation, suggesting that the directional feedback provided by HapCompass enhances the quality of demonstration data and, in turn, the trained policy. We release the design of the HapCompass device along with the code that implements our teleoperation interface: https://ripl.github.io/HapCompass/.

翻译：操控的接触丰富特性使其成为机器人遥操作领域的一项重大挑战。虽然触觉反馈对于接触丰富的任务至关重要，但在可穿戴遥操作界面中提供直观的方向提示仍是一个瓶颈。现有解决方案，如手持控制器提供的非定向振动，信息量有限，而振动触觉阵列则易受感知干扰。为应对这些限制，我们提出了HapCompass，一种新颖、低成本的可穿戴触觉装置，通过机械旋转单个线性谐振致动器（LRA）来呈现二维方向提示。我们评估了HapCompass向人类操作员传递方向提示的能力，并表明：与仅依赖视觉及非定向反馈的基线方法相比，使用该装置可提高遥操作操控任务的成功率，降低完成时间和最大接触力。此外，我们进行了初步的模仿学习评估，表明HapCompass提供的定向反馈提升了演示数据的质量，进而改善了训练策略。我们已开源HapCompass装置的设计以及实现其遥操作界面的代码：https://ripl.github.io/HapCompass/。