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A Wearable IMU System for Flexible Teleoperation of a Collaborative Industrial Robot

Increasing the accessibility of collaborative robotics requires interfaces that support intuitive teleoperation. One possibility for an intuitive interface is offered by wearable systems that measure the operator’s movement and use the information for robot control. Such wearable systems should pres...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Škulj, Gašper, Vrabič, Rok, Podržaj, Primož
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8434127/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34502761
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s21175871
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author Škulj, Gašper
Vrabič, Rok
Podržaj, Primož
author_facet Škulj, Gašper
Vrabič, Rok
Podržaj, Primož
author_sort Škulj, Gašper
collection PubMed
description Increasing the accessibility of collaborative robotics requires interfaces that support intuitive teleoperation. One possibility for an intuitive interface is offered by wearable systems that measure the operator’s movement and use the information for robot control. Such wearable systems should preserve the operator’s movement capabilities and, thus, their ability to flexibly operate in the workspace. This paper presents a novel wireless wearable system that uses only inertial measurement units (IMUs) to determine the orientation of the operator’s upper body parts. An algorithm was developed to transform the measured orientations to movement commands for an industrial collaborative robot. The algorithm includes a calibration procedure, which aligns the coordinate systems of all IMUs, the operator, and the robot, and the transformation of the operator’s relative hand motions to the movement of the robot’s end effector, which takes into account the operator’s orientation relative to the robot. The developed system is demonstrated with an example of an industrial application in which a workpiece needs to be inserted into a fixture. The robot’s motion is compared between the developed system and a standard robot controller. The results confirm that the developed system is intuitive, allows for flexible control, and is robust enough for use in industrial collaborative robotic applications.
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spelling pubmed-84341272021-09-12 A Wearable IMU System for Flexible Teleoperation of a Collaborative Industrial Robot Škulj, Gašper Vrabič, Rok Podržaj, Primož Sensors (Basel) Article Increasing the accessibility of collaborative robotics requires interfaces that support intuitive teleoperation. One possibility for an intuitive interface is offered by wearable systems that measure the operator’s movement and use the information for robot control. Such wearable systems should preserve the operator’s movement capabilities and, thus, their ability to flexibly operate in the workspace. This paper presents a novel wireless wearable system that uses only inertial measurement units (IMUs) to determine the orientation of the operator’s upper body parts. An algorithm was developed to transform the measured orientations to movement commands for an industrial collaborative robot. The algorithm includes a calibration procedure, which aligns the coordinate systems of all IMUs, the operator, and the robot, and the transformation of the operator’s relative hand motions to the movement of the robot’s end effector, which takes into account the operator’s orientation relative to the robot. The developed system is demonstrated with an example of an industrial application in which a workpiece needs to be inserted into a fixture. The robot’s motion is compared between the developed system and a standard robot controller. The results confirm that the developed system is intuitive, allows for flexible control, and is robust enough for use in industrial collaborative robotic applications. MDPI 2021-08-31 /pmc/articles/PMC8434127/ /pubmed/34502761 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s21175871 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Škulj, Gašper
Vrabič, Rok
Podržaj, Primož
A Wearable IMU System for Flexible Teleoperation of a Collaborative Industrial Robot
title A Wearable IMU System for Flexible Teleoperation of a Collaborative Industrial Robot
title_full A Wearable IMU System for Flexible Teleoperation of a Collaborative Industrial Robot
title_fullStr A Wearable IMU System for Flexible Teleoperation of a Collaborative Industrial Robot
title_full_unstemmed A Wearable IMU System for Flexible Teleoperation of a Collaborative Industrial Robot
title_short A Wearable IMU System for Flexible Teleoperation of a Collaborative Industrial Robot
title_sort wearable imu system for flexible teleoperation of a collaborative industrial robot
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8434127/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34502761
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s21175871
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