KUKAloha: A General, Low-Cost, and Shared-Control based Teleoperation Framework for Construction Robot Arm
This provides a practical solution for scalable demonstration collection and shared human-robot control in construction environments, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing teleoperation and shared-control concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of teleoperating construction robot arms by introducing KUKAloha, a shared-control framework that uses a leader-follower paradigm and autonomous perception for precise alignment, resulting in reduced operator workload and improved task efficiency in usability studies.
This paper presents KUKAloha, a general, low-cost, and shared-control teleoperation framework designed for construction robot arms. The proposed system employs a leader-follower paradigm in which a lightweight leading arm enables intuitive human guidance for coarse robot motion, while an autonomous perception module based on AprilTag detection performs precise alignment and grasp execution. By explicitly decoupling human control from fine manipulation, KUKAloha improves safety and repeatability when operating large-scale manipulators. We implement the framework on a KUKA robot arm and conduct a usability study with representative construction manipulation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that KUKAloha reduces operator workload, improves task completion efficiency, and provides a practical solution for scalable demonstration collection and shared human-robot control in construction environments.