Robotic Arm Mimicry - A thesis on motion tracking and haptic feedback to control robotic machinery

Sammanfattning: This thesis considers new ways of motion tracking and the usage of haptic feedback. The purpose is to develop and test an intuitive way of controlling robotic machinery; in this case the focus is on the arm and hand. The developing process consisted of four major steps; firstly constructing a frame for tracking the user’s arm motion, secondly creating a robotic arm responding to above mentioned tracking. The third step consisted of designing a glove to track finger motion and provide haptic feedback to the user. Last step comprised the construction of a robotic hand which follows the signal by the user through a glove. Pressure sensors are integrated in the robotic hand to supply the haptic feedback in the glove with a signal. To assess the ability of the demonstrator, two different tests are made. The first one tests the difference between the tracked arm motion (input) and the resulting robotic arm movement (output), using rotary potentiometers. The second one focuses on the haptic feedback in the glove, which allows investigating the possibility for the user to differentiate hard objects from soft objects. Results show that the robotic arm follows the tracked motion from the user with high accuracy. However, testing of the robotic hand indicates difficulties while distinguishing between hard and soft objects.