Interface Design of a Human-Robot Interaction System for Dual-Manipulators Teleoperation Based on Virtual Reality*

Abstract

This paper presents a human-robot interaction interface for dual-manipulators teleoperation based on virtual reality. Using this method, the human operator is able to control the robot at a distance to complete complicated tasks in unstructured environment. Virtual reality technology is integrated into the system to provide the first person perspective of the robot to the operator. Based on the three-dimensional coordinates of shoulder, elbow, wrist and hand captured by Kinect, a geometric model of the human arm is built. Then a geometric vector method is proposed to calculate the joint angles of human upper limbs which are translated into movement commands for a robot. To access the performance of our proposed human-robot interaction interface, teleoperation experiments are conducted on the Baxter robot, illustrating the effectiveness and feasibility of our proposed method.