ROV teleoperation via human body motion mapping: Design and experiment

Abstract

Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV) are widely used in subsea engineering such as inspection, construction and maintenance of underwater facilities. Currently, ROV controls are primarily based on control kiosks with the camera display and joystick control devices on a surface vessel. It sets a high barrier for ROV teleoperation and results in prolonged personnel on board (POB) time. This paper proposes a human body motion and hand gesture control method in Virtual Reality (VR) for ROV teleoperation in navigation and stabilization tasks. Specifically, a whole-body haptic suit converts ROV sensor data of hydrodynamic forces into haptic feedback of different magnitudes, then body-carried sensors capture and model human body motions and map them into the gesture controls of a remote ROV. As a result, a simulated haptomotor loop is accomplished, facilitating automatic and spontaneous motor controls of ROV in an intuitive way. A human subject experiment (N = 30) was performed to test the effectiveness of the proposed ROV control method. The result shows that with the proposed method, the navigation and stabilization control precision is improved, along with reduced mental load and perceived benefits. The findings will inspire the design of novel ROV teleoperation systems that would lower the professional barrier and increase broader participation in the subsea engineering of tomorrow.