Performance Comparison of Teleoperation Interfaces for Ultra-Lightweight Anthropomorphic Arms

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative performance evaluation of three different teleoperation interfaces for very low weight (<3 kg) anthropomorphic dual arms intended to conduct complex manipulation tasks involving a certain level of dexterity, accuracy and agility, either in ground service or in aerial manipulation applications. A visual human pose estimation system is developed to obtain the Cartesian and joint values of the user, which are mapped to the corresponding pose of the dual arm manipulator exploiting the equivalent human-robot kinematics. A leader-follower scheme is also presented, using a reduced scale dual arm that can replicate directly the joint positions of the leader arms to the follower arms. A 6-DOF (degrees of freedom) joystick is proposed to generate linear motions more accurately. A total of 60 ground tests were conducted involving 10 participants to determine the accuracy and time performance in two benchmarks (box edges and S contour tracking). Finally, the visual and leader-follower interfaces were evaluated with the dual arm aerial manipulator on flight tests, reporting several findings derived from the system evaluation.