A tele-operation interface with a motion capture system and a haptic glove

Tele-operation systems have been developed to perform tasks in extreme environments which cannot be easily accessed by human. However, non-intuitive control interfaces using only a keyboard or a joystick and wireless communication issues have prohibited the wide application of the tele-operation systems. In this work, an intuitive operation interface using inertial measurement units (IMUs) and a haptic glove was proposed to control a six degrees of freedom (DOFs) robot arm in remote place. Using the measured joint angles by the IMUs, the wrist position of the human arm was obtained by forward kinematics, which was used to calculate the robot joint angles by inverse kinematics. Considering workspace of the robot and human arms, robot joint angles were selected from many feasible solutions by the inverse kinematics. Also, the robot hand was controlled by the measured finger joint angles from the haptic glove, which also delivered vibration to the fingers according to the grasp force of the robot hand. As a tele-communication method, the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) Long Term Evolution (LTE) network and a virtual private network (VPN) were utilized. The performance of the proposed system was verified by experiments.