Teleoperation of Unmanned Ground Vehicles Using Human Foot-Based Interface

Teleoperation remains an important technology for robotic applications, since many tasks cannot yet be fully replaced by autonomous systems. Consequently, the investigation of new teleoperation concepts remains highly relevant for future applications. Although teleoperation has been studied for several decades, its practical use remains limited in many scenarios, and operator interfaces still offer significant potential for alternatives. Therefore, this paper presents a foot-based teleoperation concept for unmanned ground vehicles. The proposed system uses measured foot orientation to generate longitudinal and lateral vehicle commands, which are mapped to speed and steering inputs. The system is implemented and evaluated using a teleoperated small-scale model vehicle. In this four-operator feasibility pilot, the participant-level descriptive results generally favored joystick control, while all operators successfully completed the task using the foot interface. Because of the small sample and fixed condition order, these results demonstrate technical feasibility of the proposed solution.