Motion Mapping for the Heterogeneous Master-Slave Teleoperation Robot using Unit Dual Quaternions

Heterogeneous master-slave robots are widely used as both assistive robot system for the elder/disabled people and teleoperation robot system for dangerous environments, and in these applications the orientation of the links of the slave robot is critical for the convenient and intuitive teleoperation. This paper studies the motion mapping from a human master arm to a heterogeneous slave robot arm UR5 for tele-manipulation using unit dual quaternions (UDQ). Firstly, we analogy the links of the slave robot to the links of the human master arm, and accordingly group the slave arm joints into “shoulder”, “elbow” and “wrist” joint set; Then, we capture the motion (orientations) of the human master arm via a wearable motion capture system; Finally, we compute the motion of the corresponding joint-set of the heterogeneous slave robotic arm via UDQ based inverse kinematics. As a result, the operator can tele-operate the heterogeneous robot system intuitively and conveniently, and the fatigue degree and error rate of the user can be significantly reduced, and thus the safety of teleoperation in an unstructured and constrained environment can be significantly improved.