An IMUs and potentiometer-based controller for robotic arm-hand teleoperation

Abstract

Robotic teleoperation is essential to perform a task where human presence is either impossible or undesirable. The key challenges in robotic teleoperation are capturing human arm-hand functionalities and accurately computing the corresponding joint angles. This paper proposes a lightweight wearable robotic arm-hand controller using Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors and potentiometers to capture the human arm-hand functionalities up to seventeen degrees of freedom (DoF) for robotic teleoperation. The proposed controller consists of master and slave sides. On the master side, the three wearable IMU sensors capture seven DoF of human-arm orientation, and two potentiometers at each finger capture two DoF. In addition, digital controllers on the master side collect and transmit three sets of quaternion data from IMU sensors and voltage signals from potentiometers to the slave side using a Radio Frequency (RF) communication network as digital data. The digital controller on the slave side computes the joint angles of a human arm and five fingers using the digital data from the master side. It should be noted that a method has been developed to compute the joint angles of the human arm using the Relative Orientation Vector (ROV) approach. The computed joint angles of the human arm-hand are then mapped with the joint angles of the robot arm-hand model designed using Vpython. The successful working of the proposed controller has been demonstrated extensively through simulation and experimental results.