ICRA 24

Conference

iRoCo: Intuitive Robot Control From Anywhere Using a Smartwatch

Fabian C Weigend, Xiao Liu, Shubham Sonawani, Neelesh Kumar, Venugopal Vasudevan and
Heni Ben Amor

Summary: This paper introduces a framework for ubiquitous human-robot collaboration using a single smartwatch and smartphone. By integrating probabilistic differentiable filters, we optimize a combination of precise robot control and unrestricted user movement from ubiquitous devices.

The system is available as WearMocap. We demonstrate and evaluate the effectiveness of WearMoCap in practical teleoperation and drone piloting applications. Comparative analysis shows no significant difference between task performance with WearMoCap and gold-standard control systems in teleoperation tasks. Additionally, WearMoCap users complete drone piloting tasks 32% faster than with a traditional remote control and report less frustration in a subjective load index questionnaire. Our findings strongly suggest that WearMoCap is a promising new approach for intuitive robot control through smartwatches and smartphones from anywhere, at any time. The code is available at www.github.com/wearable-motion-capture