Orthographic Vision-based Interface with Motion-tracking System for Robot Arm Teleoperation

Robot teleoperation is crucial for many hazardous situations such as handling radioactive materials, undersea exploration and firefighting. Visual feedback is essential to increase the operator's situation awareness and thus accurately teleoperate a robot. In addition, the control interface is equally important as the visual feedback for effective teleoperation. In this paper, we propose a simple and cost-effective orthographic visual interface for the teleoperation system by visualizing the remote environment to provide depth information using only a single inexpensive webcam. Further, we provide a simple modification to the control interface (Leap Motion) to achieve a wider workspace and make it more convenient for the user. To realize the merits of the proposed system, a comparison between the modified Leap Motion interface and traditional control modalities (i.e., joystick and keyboard) is conducted using both the proposed orthographic vision system and a traditional binocular vision system. We conduct a user study (N = 10) to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach to teleoperate a 6-DoF arm robot to carry out a pick and place task. The results show that the combination of Leap Motion with the orthographic visual system outperforms all other combinations.