Inertial Motion Capture Based Reference Trajectory Generation for a Mobile Manipulator

This paper presents a human-robot interaction system integrating a mobile manipulator with a full-body inertial motion capture suit. The framework aims to provide an intuitive, effective and easy-to-deploy teleoperation interface. User control intent is acquired by the motion capture system in real-time, processed and relayed to the mobile manipulator wirelessly. Specifically, body center of mass and the right hand kinematic data of the user are used to generate position and orientation references for the robot base and manipulator, respectively. The left arm is employed to provide high-level user commands such as "Manipulator On/Off", "Base On/Off" and "Manipulator Pause/Resume". The efficacy of the presented system was demonstrated in real-time teleoperation experiments using KUKA youBot mobile manipulator accomplishing pick-and-place tasks.