Responsive Teleoperation of a Robotic Arm via Wearable Inertial Sensors

Abstract

Human-in-the-Ioop teleoperation stands as a pri-mary method for controlling robotic arms, offering significant practical and research applications across various fields such as industry, medicine, and home automation. In this paper, we propose a responsive system for the remote control of a robotic arm utilizing wearable inertial sensors. The system relies on three inertial units connected to low-cost wireless microcontrollers, which are placed on the user's arm. A server-side application, built on Robotic Operating System (ROS), orchestrates the inter-action between these units and the robotic arm. The robotic arm's functionality is demonstrated within a simulated environment using Gazebo (an open-source 2D/3D robotics simulator). To prove the efficacy of our proposed system, we conducted an ex-periment involving 16 users and evaluated their interaction using both objective measures (such as manipulation task execution time) and subjective metrics (including user satisfaction). Our experimentation reveals that users can teleoperate with longer times compared to real manipulation scenarios initially, but are able to gradually reduce these times as their experience increases. Furthermore, the majority of users rated the interaction as realistic, responsive, and usable.