A novel data glove for fingers motion capture using inertial and magnetic measurement units

Abstract

A novel data glove embedded low cost MEMS inertial and magnetic measurement units, is proposed for fingers motion capture. Each unit consists of a tri-axial gyroscope, a tri-axial accelerometer and a tri-axial magnetometer. The sensor board and processor board are compactly designed, which are small enough to fit the size of our fingers. The data glove is equipped with fifteen units to measure each joint angle of the fingers. Then the calibration approach is put up to improve the accuracy of measurements by both offline and online procedures, and a fast estimation method is used to determine the three orientations of fifteen units simultaneously. The proposed algorithm is easy to be implemented, and more precise and efficient measurements can be obtained as compared with existing methods. The fingers motion capture experiments are implemented to acquire the characteristics of the fingers and teleoperate the robotic hands, which prove the effectiveness of the data glove.