Remote Surfaces at Your Fingertips: Electrovibration-Based Tactile Feedback for Robot Teleoperation via Touchscreen Interfaces

Enabling operators to perceive and interact with remote environments naturally is a fundamental challenge in robotic teleoperation. This is especially critical in tasks involving physical interaction, where real-time haptic awareness improves operational safety and effectiveness. Existing kinesthetic haptic feedback methods suffer from instability during rigid surface contacts and remain sensitive to communication delays, while visual cue-based force feedback imposes additional cognitive load and limits sustained situational awareness. This work presents a teleoperation interface that conveys remote surface interactions to the operator through electrovibration-based tactile feedback, enabling naturally mapped force reflection while avoiding the stability issues associated with kinesthetic feedback and the latency limitations of mechanical actuators. A user study (N=21) evaluated interface usability, sense of presence, and operator workload under two force reflection conditions: visual feedback and electrovibration-based tactile feedback. Characterisation experiments further assessed path-following accuracy and response time across both conditions. Results show that tactile feedback significantly reduced response time by 15.35% (p=0.002, d=0.96) and increased the sense of presence by 31% (p<0.001, d=0.90) compared to visual feedback, while imposing comparable workload and usability across both conditions. These findings demonstrate that electrovibration-based tactile feedback is a viable and effective modality for robot teleoperation, improving operator responsiveness and sense of presence in contact-rich manipulation tasks, with direct applicability to safety-critical domains such as nuclear maintenance.