Teleoperating ROBONAUT: A case study

In this paper, we present a non-intrusive method for human motion estimation from a monocular video camera for the teleoperation of ROBONAUT (ROBOtic astroNAUT). ROBONAUT is an anthropomorphic robot developed at NASA - JSC, which is capable of dextrous, human- like maneuvers to handlecommonextravehicularactivity tools. The humanoperatoris represented using an articulated three-dimensional model consisting of rigid links connected by spherical joints. The shape of a link is described by a triangular 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 parameters) was 0.57 0.31 cm. The motion estimates were used to remotely command a robonaut simulation developed at NASA - JSC.

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