Preliminary Exploration of Antagonistic Vibrotactile Feedback to Improve Force Regulation in Teleoperated Bimanual Manipulation

State of the art robotic systems still struggle to accomplish complex tasks, such as bimanual manipulation, in unpredictable environments due to limitations in sensing, adaptability, and control - leading to artificially restricted autonomous system performance. This research addresses this limitation by introducing a novel metric for quantifying antagonistic internal forces during teleoperated bimanual manipulation, conveyed through minimalistic vibrotactile feedback (VF) to the operator. Experimental tests demonstrated that integrating the proposed metric through VF improved internal force regulation, reducing average internal forces by approximately 39.5% and decreasing force variability by 52.1% compared to trials without feedback. Introducing VF exhibited an increased number of occurrences of payload drops - indicative of operators pushing closer to operational limits. These findings confirm the proposed metric delivered through minimalistic VF substantially enhances teleoperated manipulation, providing a promising avenue for safer, more intuitive robotic operations in dynamic and uncertain environments.