The LeapGlove Project aims to repurpose the LucidGloves to control the LeapHand while retaining the haptic feedback capabilities of the glove.
What if your hand could feel what a robotic hand touches?
LeapGlove is a wearable system designed to bridge the physical and robotic worlds through real-time hand gesture recognition and haptic feedback. An ESP32 microcontroller connected to a custom array of sensors and servos enables the glove to detect finger motion and transmit it wirelessly to a remote robotic hand, while also recreating physical resistance in the user’s hand, mimicking what the robot feels.
The goal was to simulate a realistic sense of physical resistance, for example, stopping a user’s grip when “grabbing” an object using the robotic hand. To make this convincing haptic effect in real time, a system reaction time of under 50ms is required.
However, due to the 9g servo’s response time of 300ms (far too slow for real-time feedback), this could not be achieved using the current design. Instead, we implemented haptic presets to demonstrate the concept and prove its effectiveness.
LeapGlove proves that a human-robot interface with both motion mirroring and haptic feedback is feasible on a low budget, with only minor future design improvements needed.
The future of robotic haptics is not far away.