Gesture-Based Teleoperated Grasping for Educational Robotics

We present an interactive robotic platform for teleoperated grasping as an educational tool. With this open-source robot application, we engage children and young adults with robotics and make computer science education more vivid. Our teleoperation method uses the Leap Motion optical gesture tracker to simultaneously control each of the four degrees-of-freedom (DOF) of a robotic hand and the six-DOF tool pose of a serial manipulator. A control algorithm is developed to relate the operator’s palm pose to the manipulator’s tool pose. The operator commands the robotic hand with relative finger movements of the thumb, index, and middle finger. We present preliminary results from a pick-and-place demonstration show-cased at a public science fair held at Imperial College London.