Human Interface for Teleoperated Object Manipulation with a Soft Growing Robot
This work addresses the problem of intuitive control for soft robots in applications like disaster scenarios, representing an incremental improvement in teleoperation interfaces.
The paper tackled the challenge of teleoperating soft growing robots for manipulation tasks by proposing a human-centered interface using arm movements, resulting in users achieving a 97% success rate and average placement errors below 2 cm in a pick-and-place task.
Soft growing robots are proposed for use in applications such as complex manipulation tasks or navigation in disaster scenarios. Safe interaction and ease of production promote the usage of this technology, but soft robots can be challenging to teleoperate due to their unique degrees of freedom. In this paper, we propose a human-centered interface that allows users to teleoperate a soft growing robot for manipulation tasks using arm movements. A study was conducted to assess the intuitiveness of the interface and the performance of our soft robot, involving a pick-and-place manipulation task. The results show that users completed the task with a success rate of 97%, achieving placement errors below 2 cm on average. These results demonstrate that our body-movement-based interface is an effective method for control of a soft growing robot manipulator.