Self-balancing control and manipulation of a glove puppet robot on a two-wheel mobile platform

This video shows a continuing work of the glove puppet robot presented before. The major improvement from the previous work is to mount the 9-DOF mechanism, which mimicking a glove puppet manipulation, on a two-wheel mobile platform. The platform provides agile movements of the robot but itself is an unstable system. Hence, a self-balancing controller is implemented by considering the motion as well as configuration variation of the upper body (the 9-DOF mechanism). The control law utilizes the principle of computed torque method with online identification of related parameters using various sensors including an accelerometer. The incline angle is obtained by fusing a gyroscope and a tilt sensor. Under the balancing control, the forward motion of the robot is achieved by giving a desired tilt angle profile. To minimize the footprint of electronics, the controller is implemented using an 8-bit single-chip microcontroller. Further, to enhance the interaction capability of the system, a simple gesture coding using dynamic time warping identification method with Markov model is implemented for the data glove to recognize the puppet gesture by human hand.