Abstract
To extend the choice of inertial motion-tracking systems freely available to researchers and educators, this paper presents an alternative open-source design of a wearable 7-DOF wireless human arm motion-tracking system. Unlike traditional inertial motion-capture systems, the presented system employs a hybrid combination of two inertial measurement units and one potentiometer for tracking a single arm. The sequence of three design phases described in the paper demonstrates how the general concept of a portable human arm motion-tracking system was transformed into an actual prototype, by employing a modular approach with independent wireless data transmission to a control PC for signal processing and visualization. Experimental results, together with an application case study on real-time robot-manipulator teleoperation, confirm the applicability of the developed arm motion-tracking system for facilitating robotics research. The presented arm-tracking system also has potential to be employed in mechatronic system design education and related research activities. The system CAD design models and program codes are publicly available online and can be used by robotics researchers and educators as a design platform to build their own arm-tracking solutions for research and educational purposes.
Highlights
Human motion-tracking systems are widely used in several application areas, such as teleoperation of robot manipulators, human–robot interaction, medical diagnostics, video entertainment, virtual reality and animation, navigation, and sport [1,2,3]
The effect of magnetic distortion is removed by eliminating the bias caused by the presence of electric/electronic devices or ferromagnetic materials in the vicinity of the sensor, and applying the calibration procedure defined in the inertial measurement units (IMUs) software interface
This paper has presented in detail the development phases of the hybrid design concept of a 7-DOF
Summary
Human motion-tracking systems are widely used in several application areas, such as teleoperation of robot manipulators, human–robot interaction, medical diagnostics, video entertainment, virtual reality and animation, navigation, and sport [1,2,3]. Aiming to reduce the impact of inertial sensor data drifting and exploiting the fact that the fifth DOF contributes only to the hand wrist orientation, the authors of this paper proposed in [22] a novel hybrid combination of a 3-DOF IMU, located on the human upper arm, and a simple mechanical tracker equipped with a 1-DOF potentiometer sensor to measure the elbow’s rotation angle: this led to the design a 4-DOF low-cost upper limb position tracking system as a simplified alternative to classical two 3-DOF IMU motion trackers. This work presents a thorough discussion of the mechanical and electronic design aspects of the proposed hybrid arm motion-tracking system, and details how these aspects have been practically applied to realize a novel ready-to-use system prototype In this respect, the proposed system provides an additional option to researchers for facilitating robotics research studies and may be potentially useful in mechatronic system design education and related research activities.
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