Teleoperation control of Baxter robot based on human motion capture

Abstract

The traditional 3D human motion capture methods require operators to wear tracking sensors on their body. However, these devices would bring operators much inconvenience. Currently, vision based motion capture systems provide us an alternative approach for motion capture technology. In this paper, based on human kinematics and function approximation technique (FAT), a novel method is presented for the trajectory control of Baxter robot. Each arm of the Baxter robot has seven degrees of freedom. The geometry vector approach is applied to capture human motion trajectory by using Microsoft Kinect sensor. A FAT control system is employed to make the robot follow the trajectory of human motion. The UDP communication protocol is employed to send the reference human joint angle data to the robot. We carry out preliminary experiments on Baxter robot to verify the validity of the control approach and the results demonstrate that the method has achieved satisfactory performance.