Evaluating Lightweight Contact Feedback in Dual-Operator Collaborative Humanoid Teleoperation

Overview & Synopsis

Dual-operator humanoid teleoperation enables collaborative manipulation through two separate robots, but operators lack direct awareness of robot-object contact that is normally available during physical interaction. To address this, we present eXtended Reality Teleoperation (XRT), an extended reality teleoperation framework that returns a robot's fingertip contact through lightweight vibrotactile and/or auditory feedback, and a synchronized dual-humanoid testbed built on it for two operators. Sixteen dyads performed a collaborative crate lift-and-flip under vision only and the three feedback conditions in a counterbalanced within-subject design with verified feedback-channel delivery. Three results follow. First, operators rated our finger-localized vibrotactile display as more effective than our open-ear sonification: all 32 ranked it above the sonification, 18 ranked it most effective, and its cues were rated far easier to perceive and interpret than the auditory cues. Second, completion time, failures, workload, discomfort, and partner awareness showed no detected condition differences, with wide completion-time intervals and smaller meaningful effects unresolved. Third, performance changed substantially with practice, especially on the harder flip-over task: completion time improved across blocks, and attempt-to-attempt variation within a dyad (SD x1.51) was larger than the largest condition contrast (x1.16). Exploratory analyses detected no difference in immediate grip or motion responses between feedback conditions. For novice collaborative teleoperation, our fingertip vibrotactile cues were rated more effective and easier to interpret than our auditory cues, while their effect on task performance remains unresolved.