Balance-arm tablet computer stand for robotic camera control

Traditional methods of camera orientation control for teleoperated robots involve gamepads or joysticks with the motion of analog sticks used to control the camera direction. However, this control scheme often leads to unintuitive mappings between user input and camera actuator output. This paper describes a master-slave style camera position and orientation controller with a tablet computer showing a video feed from the robot mounted on a balance-arm (acting as the control master), affording the user a one-to-one mapping to control the viewpoint of a camera mounted on a robot arm (the slave). In this way, the tablet computer acts as a virtual window to the robot's workspace.