An Efficient Methodology to Determine the Usability of Exoskeleton to Control a Serial Manipulator

Abstract

In the field of robotics, several instances exist when a robot has to be controlled or jogged to move to a required configuration. It can be done using input devices such as a teach pendant, which requires the user to be well experienced in handling it. Another intuitive way to control a physical robot is by using an exoskeleton, a device that can be worn on a human arm which records the motion of the human which can be fed into the robot controller. In this paper, an efficient methodology to determine the usability of the exoskeleton to control a serial manipulator is presented. First, the CAD model of the exoskeleton is used to extract its Denavit–Hartenberg (DH) parameters using an analytical method developed by one of the authors. The obtained DH parameters and the CAD files of the exoskeleton are then imported in the Virtual Robot Module of RoboAnalyzer software, which acts as a server application. The virtual exoskeleton can be moved by giving the motion of the joints and hence acts as an intermediate step to validate whether the joint angles obtained from the sensors of the exoskeleton are correct or not, which otherwise requires trial and error strategy. Once the joint angles are found to be correct and free of noise, they can be used to control virtual and physical robot manipulators. In this paper, ABB IRB140 has been controlled both virtually and physically through an exoskeleton developed at ABB Ability Innovation Center.