Whole body teleoperation of a humanoid robot - development of a simple master device using joysticks

A teleoperation system for whole body motions of a humanoid robot using a simple joystick master device is developed. Humanoid robots are physically similar to humans and usually possess a large number of degrees of freedom. By using hints from the shifting of the focus of attention for body motions between the joints of the human body during task executions, we propose a switching command based teleoperation system in which the operator selects only the necessary point of the humanoid robot's body for manipulation. In this paper, we present the implementation of this switching command based teleoperation system and experimental results using this system to teleoperate the humanoid robot HRP-1S developed in the Humanoid Robotics Project of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan.