Tactile Glove

A glove covered in pressure or tactile sensors on the fingers and palm, recording the contact forces of a human hand.

A tactile glove is a device with pressure or tactile sensors arranged across the glove, recording the distribution of contact force at each point on the hand while grasping or manipulating objects. It differs in focus from a data glove (which mainly measures finger joint angles) and a haptic glove (which pushes force back onto the wearer), though the three are often combined. It's hard to tell how tightly something is being pinched, or whether it's slipping, from vision alone, and this information is critical for contact-rich tasks like wiping, plugging in connectors, or handling fragile items — so tactile gloves are used to collect force-annotated human demonstrations, study patterns of human grasping, or record touch data synchronously during teleoperation. The challenges are sensor durability and calibration, and the difference in tactile sensing between a human hand and a robot hand.

ExampleMIT's STAG glove, published in Nature in 2019, has about 550 sensors and costs roughly $10 to make, and recorded about 135,000 frames of human interaction with 26 object types; the OSMO glove, open-sourced in December 2025, places 12 three-axis tactile sensors on the fingertips and palm, with humans and the robot wearing matching gloves — a wiping policy trained only on human demonstrations reached 72% success.

Also called

Pressure-Sensing Glove, Tactile Sensing Glove

Related

Tactile Data · Data Glove · Haptic Glove · Tactile Sensor · Tactile Representation Learning · Contact-rich Manipulation

Sources

MIT News: Sensor-packed glove learns signatures of the human grasp (2019)
OSMO: Open-Source Tactile Glove for Human-to-Robot Skill Transfer (arXiv 2512.08920)

As of

2025-12