MULT: a wearable Mechanical Upper Limbs Tracker designed for teleoperation

In this paper, we present a mechanical upper limbs tracking system designed for manipulation in teleoperation scenarios. In detail, it can track position and orientation of the hand palm. Since it is linked to the Mechanical Hand Tracker (MHT), developed in a previous work, the whole structure can track position and orientation of each fingertip respect to the torso. Such a mechanism can avoid typical limits of alternative tracking methods: occlusions for optical and artificial vision methods, and lack of precision for data gloves. Also, there is no dependence with a grounded, calibrated camera system, thus the wearer can move freely in the space. These features can better fit with certain scenarios such as teleoperation and industrial settings, where reliability of the tracking is of paramount importance. On the other hand, it is challenging to design a multi-dof mechanism that can adapt to different body dimensions, and allowing a large pose workspace. In this work, we propose a methodology to design a linkage mechanism preserving complete upper limbs and fingers mobility. Teleoperation tests assessed the functionality of the developed upper-limbs tracking in a pick-and-place scenario.