TELESIM: A Modular and Plug-and-Play Framework for Robotic Arm Teleoperation using a Digital Twin

TL;DR

TELESIM is a flexible digital twin framework enabling user-friendly teleoperation of robotic arms, validated through user surveys demonstrating effective task completion across different robots and control methods.

Contribution

Introduces TELESIM, a modular plug-and-play digital twin framework for robotic arm teleoperation, with validation through user studies showing broad applicability and ease of use.

Findings

Most users successfully built a 3-cube tower within 10 minutes.

TELESIM's effectiveness is consistent across different robots and control modalities.

Users required only 5 minutes of training to perform the task.

Abstract

We present TELESIM, a modular and plug-and-play framework for direct teleoperation of a robotic arm using a digital twin as the interface between the user and the robotic system. We tested TELESIM by performing a user survey with 37 participants on two different robots using two different control modalities: a virtual reality controller and a finger mapping hardware controller using different grasping systems. Users were asked to teleoperate the robot to pick and place 3 cubes in a tower and to repeat this task as many times as possible in 10 minutes, with only 5 minutes of training beforehand. Our experimental results show that most users were able to succeed by building at least a tower of 3 cubes regardless of the control modality or robot used, demonstrating the user-friendliness of TELESIM.