Development of a user experience enhanced teleoperation approach

Abstract

In this paper, we have investigated various techniques that can be used to enhance user experience for robot teleoperation. In our teleoperation system design, the human operator are provided with both immersive visual feedback and intuitive skill transfer interface such that when controlling a telerobot arm, a user is able to “feel” in a first person perspective in terms of both visual and haptic sense. A number of high-tech devices including Omni haptic joystick, MYO armband, Oculus Rift DK2 headset, and Kinect v2 camera are integrated. The surface electromyography (sEMG) signal allows operator to naturally and efficiently transfer his/her motion skill to the robot, based on the properly designed elastic force feedback. For visual feedback, operators can control the pose of a camera on the head of the robot via the wearable visual headset, such that the operator is able to perceive from the robot's perspective. Extensive tests have been performed with human subjects to evaluate the design, and the experimental results have shown that superior performance and better user experience have been achieved by the proposed method in comparison with the traditional methods.