Armrest Joystick -mechanism design and basic experiments-

Manipulators, which are mounted on robots that substitute man at dangerous places like indoors and outdoors disaster sites or mine fields, have been mainly controlled by joysticks. However, joysticks are difficult to manipulate and complex tasks become hard to be done by operators because of a limit and discordance of controlled degree of freedom. Therefore, a controller with high operability like the Master-Slave system is needed, nevertheless conventional controllers are not used in these situations because there is no controller which has compact structures and intuitively controls 3DOF position and 3DOF posture. In this research, we propose a remote controller “Armrest Joystick” of the Master-Slave system which has high portability and operability. The Armrest Joystick is attached to a foldable portable chair and can be carried easily. It consists of a 3DOF position controller with an armrest supporting the operator´s arm during operations, a 3DOF posture controller and a gripper controller. Furthermore, it has motors for the force feedback on all axes for more intuitive operations. In this paper, we report the basic concept and design of the Armrest Joystick, and the experiments which verify operability and the validity of the force feedback.