HAPCOMPASS: A Rotational Haptic Device for Contact-Rich Robotic Teleoperation

Xiangshan Tan1, Jingtian Ji1, Tianchong Jiang1, Pedro Lopes2, Matthew R. Walter1
1Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), 2University of Chicago
Paper Code 3D Design
Teaser Image

HapCompass teleoperation system. (a) An operator controls the robot via hand tracking while wearing our novel HapCompass device. (b) The robot arm executes the manipulation commands. (c) We evaluate the system on three contact-rich tasks: Key Insertion, USB Insertion, and Spaghetti Probing, with (left) our method achieving higher success than (right) baseline methods.

Device Structure Video

Abstract

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, vision-tracking-based teleoperation interfaces remains a bottleneck. Existing solutions, such as non-directional vibrations from handheld controllers, provide limited information, while vibrotactile arrays can be challenging due to perceptual interference from their many actuators. 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 demonstrated 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. We have released the full design of the HapCompass device along with the code that implements our teleoperation interface.

Teleoperation System Structure

HapCompass provides a complete teleoperation system for contact-rich robotic manipulation comprising three core components: a wearable haptic device, an architecture for data and control flow, and a rendering algorithm that translates robot sensor data into directional tactile cues.

Teleoperation System Structure Image

Experiment 1: Directional Rendering Performance

Objective: To quantitatively measure whether participants can understand directional information rendered by the HapCompass device.

Task: Participants performed two direction-identification tasks: (1) a four-alternative forced-choice (4-AFC) task involving the four cardinal directions (up, down, left, right); and (2) a more challenging eight-alternative forced-choice (8-AFC) task that also included the four intercardinal directions. The results show that participants can interpret the directional cues from the HapCompass device with accuracies significantly above chance level in both tasks.

Directional Rendering Performance Image

Experiment 2: Teleoperation Performance

Objective: Evaluate the effectiveness of the HapCompass system in improving operator performance during contact-rich manipulation tasks.

Tasks: We designed three tasks to assess performance across different challenges in contact-rich manipulation: Key Insertion, USB Insertion, and Spaghetti Probing.

Teleoperation Performance Table

BibTeX

@inproceedings{tan2026hapcompass,
  author    = {Tan, Xiangshan and Ji, Jingtian and Jiang, Tianchong and Lopes, Pedro and Walter, Matthew R.},
  title     = {HapCompass: A Rotational Haptic Device for Contact-Rich Robotic Teleoperation},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year      = {2026},
}