Immersive ROS-integrated framework for robot teleoperation

The development of natural interfaces for human-robot interaction provides the user an intuitive way to control and guide robots. In this paper, we propose a novel ROS (Robot Operating System)-integrated interface for remote control that allows the user to teleoperate the robot using his hands motion. The user can adjust online the autonomy of the robot between two levels: direct control and waypoint following. The hand tracking and gestures recognition capabilities of the Leap Motion device are exploited to generate the control commands. The user receives a real-time 3D augmented visual feedback using a Kinect sensor and a HMD. To assess the practicability of the system experimental results are presented using as a benchmark the remote control of a Kuka Youbot.