• Teleoperazione

The demand for robotics intervention in hazardous and difficult environments is growing. Recent advances in robotic systems lead to think that robot can approach crucial tasks in hazardous situations. Motivated by this, after the disaster in the Nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan, the DARPA organised a robotic challenged (DRC) in which 23 humanoid robots tried to attempt complex tasks, simulating actions potentially useful in a dangerous place. The complex and highly sensitized robotic systems at took part to the DRC showed that the automatic skills of a robot in our days are still far from those possessed by man. On the other hand a tele-operated robotic avatar, by transferring some of the man’s skills to the robot via suitable human-robot interface, brings the intelligence of the human pilot where it is needed and in the mean time preserves the pilot from high risks for his health. In this work, a teleoperation systems for a dual arm torso provided with a three degree of freedom head equipped with a stereo camera, two impedance controlled kuka manipulators, equipped with SoftHands, has been developed. In particular, the developed human-robot-interface was lightweight and fully wearable to allow smooth teleoperation of: robot head, reference position and stiffness of the arms, and hand closures. The motion capture interface fuses the informations coming from different sensors: IMU (fast but drift), depth cameras (slow rate but reliable). An extensive validation of the system has been carried out to assess the platform.
Main contribution of the thesis: Motion Capture system, Drift correction and system validation.