Intuitive Bare-Hand Teleoperation of a Robotic Manipulator Using Virtual Reality and Leap Motion

Despite various existing works on intuitive human-robot interaction (HRI) for teleoperation of robotic manipulators, to the best of our knowledge, the following research question has not been investigated yet: Can we have a teleoperated robotic manipulator that simply copies a human operator’s bare hand posture and gesture in a real-time manner without having any hand-held devices? This paper presents a novel teleoperation system that attempts to address this question. Firstly, we detail how to set up the system practically by using a Universal Robots UR5, a Robotiq 3-finger gripper, and a Leap Motion based on Unity and ROS, and describe specifically what information is communicated between each other. Furthermore, we provide the details of the ROS nodes developed for controlling the robotic arm and gripper, given the information of a human’s bare hands sensed by the Leap Motion. Then, we demonstrate our system executing a simple pick-and-place task, and discuss possible benefits and costs of this HRI concept.