STRP: A Low-Cost Teleoperation Platform with Spatial Force Feedback for Visually Occluded Dexterous Manipulation in Hazardous Environments

Abstract

High-voltage grid maintenance and chemical processing demand dexterous manipulation in confined, visually occluded environments. Existing teleoperation systems present a severe cost–fidelity trade-off: industrial platforms exceed USD 60,000 yet lack spatial directional resolution, while affordable alternatives omit fingertip force sensing entirely. We present STRP (Spatial Teleoperation Research Platform), a low-cost teleoperation system with concurrent motion capture and directional haptic feedback that encodes fingertip six-axis force vectors into four-directional vibrotactile cues (left, right, dorsal, volar). The master interface is a wearable 15-DoF exoskeleton glove with Hall-effect joint sensing and a 16-channel LRA array; the slave end is a 17-DoF dexterous hand with integrated micro six-axis force/torque sensors. Experimental validation demonstrates 97.5% blind discrimination accuracy for directional cues and an end-to-end latency of approximately 28 ms. In teleoperated pick-and-place tasks, multi-directional tactile feedback reduced task completion time by 41% (31.2 s to 18.4 s) and peak grip force by 32% (4.11 N to 2.79 N) versus no-feedback baselines. In visually occluded wall exploration, directional feedback enabled systematic location of all target walls, whereas single-site volar feedback permitted detection of only volar-facing surfaces and no-feedback conditions precluded any spatial reasoning. These results identify spatial directional vibrotactile feedback as a distinct sensory channel that cannot be substituted by magnitude-only vibration or vision alone. STRP establishes a foundation for affordable, high-fidelity haptic teleoperation in hazardous environments.