Wearable interface based on inertial sensors for master-slave robot teleoperation

An interface based on inertial sensors with applications for master slave robotic teleoperation is developed. The interface is composed of two portable inertial sensor units which are placed on the upper and lower arm in order to obtain acceleration and turning rates. The data is internally processed by a DSP in the sensors and yields orientation measurements of the bodies they are attached. Thus measurement of the angular position of shoulder and elbow of the operator is done on real time. Then by using kinematic models of the human arm the wrist human Cartesian trajectory is determined. The wrist trajectory is imposed as desired trajectory to a robot system which behaves as slave system. By means of a control technique, in this particular case a standard PID control, the slave robot is capable to track wrist human movements on 3D space. For validation purposes the proposed interface and teleoperation system are implemented with a three degree of freedom (dof) delta configuration parallel robot as slave system. The experiments shows the interface viability and its performance.