An Intuitive Teleoperation of Industrial Robots: Approach Manipulators by Using Visual Tracking Over a Distributed System

Abstract

Teleoperation of manipulator robots with RGB-D sensors is now mainly done using inverse kinematics techniques. In this chapter, we describe an intuitive way to teleoperate an industrial manipulator through vision sensors by directly controlling manipulator joints retargeting specific human motion. In this way the human operator has the full control of robot movements with practically no training, because of the intuitivity of this teleoperation method. The remapping into the robot joints is done by computing angles between vectors built from positions of human joints, tracked by the selected vision sensor. The obtained system is very modular which allows to change either the tracking sensor or the robot model with some small changes. Finally, the developed teleoperation system has been successfully tested on two real Comau robots, revealing to be fast and strongly reliable.