Design of Imitative Control Modalities for a 3 Degree of Freedom Robotic Arm

This research article focuses on enabling real-time Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) with two input control modalities designed to control a robotic arm. The robotic arm comprises of 3 Degrees of Freedom (DOF) and is controlled using the following 2 strategies: Inertial Sensor-glove and Image-based visual servoing. The Mathematical model of the given 3 DOF robotic arm was derived and the two proposed methods were explicitly designed for the same. The inertial sensor-glove, worn by the user, is embedded with inertial sensors that provide data to track the motion of the user's arm. The Image-based visual servoing modality is a mono-vision based approach which tracks the motion of a target object held by the user using a camera and operates similar to a mouse-pointer but in 3 dimensions. Fitts’s Targeting tasks were performed to analyse the performance of these Human-Robot Interactive input modalities.