This post discusses how to develop a low cost sensor glove with tactile feedback using flex sensors and small vibration motors. MATLAB and JAVA code is linked.

Documentation

• Weber, Paul; Rueckert, Elmar; Calandra, Roberto; Peters, Jan; Beckerle, Philipp
  A Low-cost Sensor Glove with Vibrotactile Feedback and Multiple Finger Joint and Hand Motion Sensing for Human-Robot Interaction Inproceedings
  Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2016. https://ai-lab.science/wp/ROMANS2016Weber.pdf

• Rueckert, Elmar; Lioutikov, Rudolf; Calandra, Roberto; Schmidt, Marius; Beckerle, Philipp; Peters, Jan
  Low-cost Sensor Glove with Force Feedback for Learning from Demonstrations using Probabilistic Trajectory Representations
  Inproceedings ICRA 2015 Workshop on Tactile and force sensing for autonomous compliant intelligent robots, 2015. https://ai-lab.science/wp/ICRA2015Rueckertb.pdf

Hardware

• Arduino Mega 2560 Board
• Check which USB device is used (e.g., by running dmesg). On most of our machines it is /dev/ttyACM0
• Enable read/write permissions if necessary, e.g., run sudo chmod o+rw /dev/ttyACM0
• Serial protocoll based communication: Flex sensor readings are streamed and Vibration motor PWM values can be set between 0 and 255
• Firmware can be found here (follow the instructions in the README.txt to compile and upload the firmware)
• Features frame rates of up to 350Hz
• Five flex sensors provide continuous readings within the range [0, 1024]

Simple Matlab Serial Interface – max 100Hz

• Download the Matlab demo code from here
• Tell Matlab which serial ports to use: copy the java.opts file to your Matlab bin folder, e.g., to /usr/local/MATLAB/R2012a/bin/glnxa64/
• Run FastComTest.m

Fast Mex-file based Matlab Interface – max 350Hz

• Install libserial-dev
• Download the code from here
• Compile the mex function with: mex SensorGloveInterface.cpp -lserial
• Run EventBasedSensorGloveDemo.m