Position Teaching of a Robot Arm by Demonstration with a Wearable Input Device

This paper describes the first prototype of a “Programming by demonstration” (PbD) system for position teaching of a robot manipulator. A new approach for enabling PbD using supervised learning is presented, by connecting a wearable input device for sensing human arm movements to the software controller of a robot arm. The method does not require analytical modelling of either the human arm or robot, and can be customised for different users and robots. Initial experiments on some simple movements tasks are presented.