Workshop
Objective
This workshop brings together researchers working on soft haptic interfaces, covering topics from smart materials and soft haptic actuator/sensor fabrication to system integration and haptic rendering. The goal is to share recent advances, foster cross-disciplinary discussion, and identify future research directions in skin-conformal multi-modal haptic technology.
Abstract
Haptic gloves are increasingly employed across a wide range of human-machine interaction scenarios, including user interaction with virtual environments in metaverse and XR platforms, teleoperation of remote robotic systems, and robot learning frameworks such as sim-to-real transfer, where human demonstration data collected via haptic gloves serves as training input for robotic manipulation policies. In all of these contexts, the quality and naturalness of tactile feedback directly determines the fidelity of the interaction, the accuracy of the data collected, and ultimately the performance of the systems that depend on it.
However, existing haptic glove technologies rely on vibrotactile motors or cable-and-brake mechanisms that suffer from bulk, limited tactile modalities, and occlusion of natural skin contact, leaving pressure distribution, thermal sensation, and surface micro-texture largely unaddressed.
This workshop addresses these challenges through contributions spanning ultra-thin multi-modal flexible haptic actuators based on electroactive polymer materials, DLP-based flexible substrates with DIW-based liquid metal electrodes and temperature sensor arrays, high-resolution multi-modal flexible tactile sensors, integrated driver hardware and software development kits, haptic rendering algorithms for flexible actuators, and novel interaction methods enabled by skin-conformal haptic interfaces. Together, these contributions chart a coherent path from foundational soft material science to deployable tactile interaction systems applicable to metaverse platforms, teleoperation, sim-to-real robot learning, surgical simulation, and next-generation flexible sensory displays.
