Motion Mapping in the Joint Space for the Control of the Heterogeneous Wheelchair-Mounted Robotic Arm

Wheelchair-Mounted Robotic Arm (WMRA) is a typical assistive robot system for the elder/ disabled people.This paper studies the motion mapping from a human master arm to a heterogeneous slave WMRA for manipulation in activity of daily livings.The motion of the human master arm is measured via a wearable motion capture system, and then the motion captured data is transformed into the joint space of the heterogeneous slave robot arm using a corresponding joint-set motion mapping algorithm, and an autonomous obstacle avoidance algorithm is also developed, as a result, the motion of the heterogeneous slave WMRA can be easily controlled by the user via the motion of his/her arm.This method possesses two remarkable advantages that are vital to the application of the WMRA systems: the elder/disabled user can operate the WMRA system intuitively and conveniently, and the fatigue degree and error rate of the user can be significantly reduced; the safety of WMRA in an unstructured and constrained home environment can be significantly improved. © 2018, Chinese Institute of Electronics. All right reserved.