A Teleoperation Interface for Loco-Manipulation Control of Mobile Collaborative Robotic Assistant

  • Yuqiang Wu
  • , Pietro Balatti
  • , Marta Lorenzini
  • , Fei Zhao
  • , Wansoo Kim
  • , Arash Ajoudani

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

91 Scopus citations

Abstract

This letter presents a novel teleoperation interface that enables remote loco-manipulation control of a MObile Collaborative robotic Assistant (MOCA). MOCA is a new research platform developed at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), which is composed of a lightweight manipulator arm, a Pisa/IIT SoftHand, and a mobile platform driven by four omni-directional wheels. A whole-body impedance controller is consequently developed to ensure accurate tracking of the impedance and position trajectories at MOCA end-effector by considering the causal interactions in such a dynamic system. The proposed teleoperation interface provides the user with two control modes: locomotion and manipulation. The locomotion mode receives inputs from a personalized human center-of-pressure model, which enables real-time navigation of the MOCA mobile base in the environment. The manipulation mode receives inputs from a tele-impedance interface, which tracks human arm endpoint stiffness and trajectory profiles in real time and replicates them using the MOCA's whole-body impedance controller. To evaluate the performance of the proposed teleoperation interface in the execution of remote tasks with dynamic uncertainties, a sequence of challenging actions, i.e., navigation, door opening, and wall drilling, has been considered in the experimental setup.

Original languageEnglish
Article number8764016
Pages (from-to)3593-3600
Number of pages8
JournalIEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Volume4
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2019

Keywords

  • Telerobotics and teleoperation
  • mobile manipulation
  • physical human-robot interaction

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