A Tetherless Soft Robotic Wearable Haptic Human Machine Interface for Robot Teleoperation

This work describes the development, demonstration, and performance evaluation study of a wearable human machine interface for robotic teleoperation. We present a novel tetherless human machine interface in the form of a backpack, wearable 3D arm motion capture sensors, finger flexion sensors, and pneumatic haptic feedback muscles. The system is integrated in a complete teleoperation framework, enabling users to be immersed in a remote environment through virtual reality headgear, facilitating intuitive manipulation of an industrial articulated arm. The human machine interface samples the kinematic configuration of the user’s arm, hand, and fingers using multiple inertial measurement units and capacitive sensors respectively, and streams it to the teleoperation software stack. The gripping forces experienced at the robot’s end-effector are acquired using a custom three-dimensional Hall-effect magnetic sensor. The system simultaneously renders the kinesthetic and tactile feedback on the user’s fingers through custom designed pneumatically actuated soft robotic haptic muscles. The efficacy of the human machine interface and the teleoperation system was tested and evaluated by conducting user studies, which showed 31.4% faster teleoperation compared to a keypad controller, and 60% less gripping force utilized with haptics enabled. The findings of the study guided the design and prototype development of a printed electronics based stretchable sleeve and glove motion capture unit to improve the portability, ergonomics, and user experience of the human machine interface.