Action synchronization between human and UAV robotic arms for remote operation

This paper presents a novel automatic system that remote operations between the user arm and a multi-rotor UAV robotic arm to achieve synchronizes actions. The system contains three parts: two sets of IMU motion sensors, a six-degrees-of-freedom robotic arm attached to a UAV, and a ground station that displays the real-time videos sent back by the UAV-based camera. The system targets to perform operations in a remote or hazardous environment, such as water sampling, leakage estimation, or radiation measurement. A two-step control scheme is developed to achieve action synchronization for remote operation. First, the UAV is controlled by user instruction of remote controller to reach the desired location and posture. Second, the user controls UAV robotic arm with IMU motion sensors, according to the real-time videos transmitted back by the UAV-based camera. The synchronous errors between two arms are reduced by using a PID controller. The system has been validated through a number of experiments, and its performance can achieve acceptable accuracies for many real-world applications.