High-Speed and Impact Resilient Teleoperation of Humanoid Robots

TL;DR

This paper introduces an integrated teleoperation system for humanoid robots that combines calibration-free motion capture, low-latency kinematics streaming, and impact-resistant actuators, enabling high-speed, responsive, and resilient control.

Contribution

It presents a novel, simplified motion retargeting method using only 7 IMUs and a real-time kinematics streaming toolbox, enhancing teleoperation performance and robustness.

Findings

Effective real-time control demonstrated on Nadia robot

Reduced latency and improved responsiveness achieved

System withstands high speeds and impacts

Abstract

Teleoperation of humanoid robots has long been a challenging domain, necessitating advances in both hardware and software to achieve seamless and intuitive control. This paper presents an integrated solution based on several elements: calibration-free motion capture and retargeting, low-latency fast whole-body kinematics streaming toolbox and high-bandwidth cycloidal actuators. Our motion retargeting approach stands out for its simplicity, requiring only 7 IMUs to generate full-body references for the robot. The kinematics streaming toolbox, ensures real-time, responsive control of the robot's movements, significantly reducing latency and enhancing operational efficiency. Additionally, the use of cycloidal actuators makes it possible to withstand high speeds and impacts with the environment. Together, these approaches contribute to a teleoperation framework that offers unprecedented performance. Experimental results on the humanoid robot Nadia demonstrate the effectiveness of the integrated system.