A Portable and Passive Gravity Compensation Arm Support for Drone Teleoperation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a passive gravity compensation arm support for drone teleoperation that significantly reduces shoulder fatigue, fits a wide range of users, and maintains high control accuracy through mechanical design and validation.

Contribution

A novel portable, passive arm support device that reduces fatigue and fits diverse users, validated through mechanical modeling and user testing.

Findings

Reduces shoulder muscular fatigue by 58% on average.

Achieves mean torque error below 0.005 N/kg for over 97% of motion range.

Validated with mechanical characterization and user studies.

Abstract

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 na\"ive 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.