Abstract
This article presents a multiplatform application for the tele-operation of a robot hand using virtualization in Unity 3D. This approach grants usability to users that need to control a robotic hand, allowing supervision in a collaborative way. This paper focuses on a user application designed for the 3D virtualization of a robotic hand and the tele-operation architecture. The designed system allows for the simulation of any robotic hand. It has been tested with the virtualization of the four-fingered Allegro Hand of SimLab with 16 degrees of freedom, and the Shadow hand with 24 degrees of freedom. The system allows for the control of the position of each finger by means of joint and Cartesian co-ordinates. All user control interfaces are designed using Unity 3D, such that a multiplatform philosophy is achieved. The server side allows the user application to connect to a ROS (Robot Operating System) server through a TCP/IP socket, to control a real hand or to share a simulation of it among several users. If a real robot hand is used, real-time control and feedback of all the joints of the hand is communicated to the set of users. Finally, the system has been tested with a set of users with satisfactory results.
Highlights
Tele-operation of robots has traditionally been performed with high costs and has been very important in dangerous environments, rescue tasks, robotic surgery, and so on [1]
If some movements are performed in the virtual environment of the robotic hand, they will be performed in the real one and updated for the rest of the users connected to the same server
If two hands need to be controlled by the same server, it must be taken into consideration that the hand controller, in the case of the Shadow hand, does not allow several real hands to be controlled the same computer; the Allegro Hand allows several hands to be controlled the same computer
Summary
Tele-operation of robots has traditionally been performed with high costs and has been very important in dangerous environments, rescue tasks, robotic surgery, and so on [1]. There was one main problem in all these works: there was no intuitive user interface [9] For this reason, it is important to consider hand-held devices. HiBot [31] is an ROS-based, generic, configurable, and remote task management framework for robots, which implements task definition, remote task distribution, remote task monitoring, and remote task control of the robot Another interesting tool to connect the ROS with Android devices is ROSBridge [32], which enables ROS to communicate with the web and application developers (for communication with robots), and allows robotics researchers to communicate with each other. The approach in this paper is a collaborative, user-friendly environment based on Unity 3D to connect a user’s virtualization of a robot hand with the real hand through a remote ROS server.
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