InterActive and intuitiVe control interfAce for a Tele-operAted Robot (AVATAR) system

Tele-operation systems have been developed to perform tasks in extreme environments that cannot be accessed easily by humans. However, non-intuitive control interfaces, low immersive feeling, and wireless communication issues have prevented the wide application of such tele-operation systems. In this study, an intuitive and interactive control interface using inertial measurement units (IMUs), a wearable sensing glove, and a head-mounted display (HMD) is proposed to control a tele-operated robot in a remote place. Using user information measured from the wearable interface, the desired joint angles of the robot are derived by a kinematic analysis of the robot. Also, the measured visual information and the torque of the robot hand are transmitted to the user as visual feedback on the HMD and vibrational feedback to the user's fingertips, respectively. A semi-autonomous control strategy, referred to as shared control, was developed to overcome dimensional differences between the user and the robot, and to reduce the user's workload. As telecommunication methods, a long-term evolution (LTE) and a virtual private network (VPN) are used. The performance of the proposed system was verified by experiments.