A Portable and Passive Gravity Compensation Arm Support for Drone Teleoperation
This addresses fatigue for users of gesture-controlled drones, though it is an incremental improvement in ergonomic support.
The researchers tackled the problem of arm fatigue in gesture-based drone teleoperation by developing a passive arm support that reduces shoulder muscle activity by an average of 58% with a mean torque error under 0.005 N/kg for most of the motion range.
Gesture-based interfaces are often used to achieve a more natural and intuitive teleoperation of robots. Yet, sometimes, gesture control requires postures or movements that cause significant fatigue to the user. In a previous user study, we demonstrated that naïve users can control a fixed-wing drone with torso movements while their arms are spread out. However, this posture induced significant arm fatigue. In this work, we present a passive arm support that compensates the arm weight with a mean torque error smaller than 0.005 N/kg for more than 97% of the range of motion used by subjects to fly, therefore reducing muscular fatigue in the shoulder of on average 58%. In addition, this arm support is designed to fit users from the body dimension of the 1st percentile female to the 99th percentile male. The performance analysis of the arm support is described with a mechanical model and its implementation is validated with both a mechanical characterization and a user study, which measures the flight performance, the shoulder muscle activity and the user acceptance.