An online inertial sensor-guided motion control for tracking human arm movements by robots

Abstract

We propose a simple and efficient online strategy based on inertial sensors to follow human arm movements in the task space by robotic platforms. The strategy is composed by the following ingredients: 2 inertial sensors attached to the human arm and forearm, the differential kinematics (DK) as well as the dynamic model of the corresponding robot and a motion control scheme. We use inertial sensors to obtain the orientation measurements of the human bodies in real-time. These body parameters together with the DK module allow us to map human hand trajectories into the joint space of the robot, where a standard PID control is implemented. Overall our strategy is able to transfer motion skills from human to a given robot by means of an online inertial sensor-guided motion control. Moreover, our method can be used for robot teleoperation applications in a master-slave configuration, with a human interface based on inertial sensors. We have successfully validated in simulations the effectiveness of the proposed strategy in a 2 degrees of freedom (dof) planar robot.