Miniature Tangible Cube: Concept and Design of Target-Object-Oriented User Interface for Dual-Arm Telemanipulation

In recent years, there has been a great deal of research on teleoperation of robots, and many end-effector-oriented control systems have been proposed, but these systems have difficulties in performing manipulation tasks with physical contacts between the target object, the robot, and the environment, such as dual-arm manipulation, because these systems can only express the end-effectors’ pose and force commands. In this study, we propose Target-object-oriented User Interface (TOOUI) that focuses on the target object rather than the end effectors of the robot, and develop a tangible device called Miniature Tangible Cube as a TOOUI. Through this device, the pilot can express the target orientation and contact state of the target object, and the robot can be teleoperated to do dual-arm manipulation tasks with geometric and physical constraints. For dual-arm manipulation tasks, we also implement a dual-arm telemanipulation system with the Miniature Tangible Cube using the motion planner based on state machine. In the experiments, we evaluated our system with the Miniature Tangible Cube by conducting dual-arm manipulation tasks with the dual-arm robot PR2 in the real world.