Real-Time Joystick Teleoperation of the Sawyer Robot Using a Numerical Approach

Teleoperation is an important task in robotics for remote working. Although there are approaches for teleoperating robots, most of them are closed source, proprietary, or targeted at specific platforms without a proper generalization to other robots. In this work, we present an open framework that allows a robot to be teleoperated in real time using a joystick. The joystick acts as a velocity controller that drives the robot motion in the Cartesian space using a numeric approach to solve for inverse kinematics. The advantage of the numeric approach is that it can be applied to any type of robot even if it is redundant. We experimentally tested our approach with the Sawyer robot, but the approach is generic and can be extended to any robot.