Whole Body Teleoperation of a Humanoid Robot Development of a Simple Master Device using Joysticks

摘要

This paper presents a novel method for the whole body teleoperation of a humanoid robot using simple input device. A typical humanoid robot would have more than 20 DOF. Due to the complexity, it requires an effective way for whole body teleoperation. Getting hints from the shifting of locus of attention for body motions between the joints of human body during task executions, this paper proposes a switching command based whole body teleoperation method. Instead of giving command to all joints all the time, the operator selects only the necessary point of the humanoid robot for teleoperation. This switching teleoperation method enables flexible teleoperation of humanoid robots using only simple input devices. The proposed method is implemented as a teleoperation system using two 3 DOF joysticks to operate a real 30 DOF humanoid robot, HRP-1S, which is developed in the Humanoid Robotics Project of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed with experiments teleoperating HRP-1S.