Distant human motion programming of hexapods with the help of stereoscopic visualization

This paper describes a hardware and a method for motion programming robots having six or more legs. The hardware consists of 3 low-cost capacitive accelerometers placed on the human body. Each accelerometer can measure 3 perpendicular axis. Each sensor has a microcontroller connected to it, this way the generated signal can be post-processed, avoiding a few noise sources. The controlled robot has six legs, each leg has 3 degrees of freedom. The whole robot has eighteen degrees of freedom. Because of this the motion control is a very difficult task and there are situations that can´t be solved with algorithms. That is why we used human motion for controlling the robot. The method can be used even when the robot is far from the user, because the movements are animated using 3D stereoscopic visualization.