A graphical user interface for tele-operated robotic sample acquisition

This paper presents a graphical user interface (GUI), which has been developed for tele-operation of a robotic arm for sample retrieval and collection. Combinations of control functions have been defined and implemented to alleviate the operator's efforts in robotic arm manipulation. Also, a series of pop-up style dialogue boxes have been proposed to accept the operators' inputs for selected functions. Furthermore, an emergency halt function is provided to allow the operators to terminate the robotic arm's operation in the event of an unexpected situation. The developed GUI is also capable of task planning in offline mode. An intelligent server/client architecture has been implemented to enable efficient tele-operated control of the robotic arm. The presented interface can also be used with multiple systems with minimal changes. To verify the effectiveness of the developed GUI, experiments have been conducted using a robotic arm comprised of three rotary joints.