Natural interface for robotic arm controlling based on inertial motion capture

Abstract

This article presents new developed natural interface for robotic arm remote controlling. The interface is built with use of inertial motion trackers. There are used two types of motion trackers. The first tracker type is Xsens Xbus Kit tracker which is mounted on the operator's arm and the second is type is Razer Hydra Controller which is attached to the controlled robot. Hydra controller is used to determine robotic arm localization in 3D space because of that the robotic arm taken for the interface evaluation is very simple and has not special equipment for this purpose. This article describes algorithms developed for processing inertial motion data for the robot steering purposes. One of the most difficult problem which was resolved in sufficient manner and described in this article is processing acceleration data to estimate linear position of the robotic arm adequate to operator's motion. The article present results of algorithms' parameter values selections and results of practical evaluation of the interface.