Teleoperating ROBONAUT: A case study

Abstract

In this paper, we present a non-intrusive method for human motion estima-tion from a monocular video camera for the teleoperation of ROBONAUT (ROBOtic astroNAUT). ROBONAUT is an anthropomorphic robot devel-oped at NASA- JSC, which is capable of dextrous, human- like maneuvers to handle common extravehicular activity tools. The human operator is repre-sented using an articulated three-dimensional model consisting of rigid links connected by spherical joints. The shape of a link is described by a triangu-lar mesh and its motion by six parameters: one three-dimensional translation vector and three rotation angles. The motion parameters of the links are estimated by maximizing the conditional probability of the frame-to-frame intensity differences at observation points. The algorithm was applied to real test sequences of a moving arm with very encouraging results. Specifically, the mean error for the derived wrist position (using the estimated motion pa-rameters) was 0.570.31 cm. The motion estimates were used to remotely command a robonaut simulation developed at NASA- JSC. 1