Wearable joystick for gloves-on human/computer interaction

Abstract

In this paper, we present preliminary work on a novel wearable joystick for gloves-on human/computer interaction in hazardous environments. Interacting with traditional input devices can be clumsy and inconvenient for the operator in hazardous environments due to the bulkiness of multiple system components and troublesome wires. During a collapsed structure search, for example, protective clothing, uneven footing, and "'snag"' points in the environment can render traditional input devices impractical. Wearable computing has been studied by various researchers to increase the portability of devices and to improve the proprioceptive sense of the wearer's intentions. Specifically, glove-like input devices to recognize hand gestures have been developed for generalpurpose applications. But, regardless of their performance, prior gloves have been fragile and cumbersome to use in rough environments. In this paper, we present a new wearable joystick to remove the wires from a simple, two-degree of freedom glove interface. Thus, we develop a wearable joystick that is low cost, durable and robust, and wire-free at the glove. In order to evaluate the wearable joystick, we take into consideration two metrics during operator tests of a commercial robot: task completion time and path tortuosity. We employ fractal analysis to measure path tortuosity. Preliminary user test results are presented that compare the performance of both a wearable joystick and a traditional joystick.

The gestural joystick and the efficacy of the path tortuosity metric for human/robot interaction

“…Since emergency responders are required to wear heavy gloves to insulate themselves from the hazardous environment, we have been investigating ways to embed wearable human/robot interfaces into the bulky clothing itself --exploiting it as an asset, rather then a liability. presented in [13] (and shown in Figure 1) for our USAR robot, TerminatorBot [4], which is a miniature robot for core-bored inspection tasks. This interface paradigm grew from the burdens of providing an intuitive interface and controller for the TerminatorBot with conventional interaction devices (Figure 2).…”

Magnetoresistive Sensor Development Roadmap (Non-Recording Applications)

“…Especially, more biomedical applications with MR sensors were explored (increased from 30% in 2001-2005 to 54% in 2006-2011) [34-40, 42, 222]. With the development of flexible sensor substrates, a growing number of MR sensors with high tolerable tensile strain [70,73,75] were integrated into wearable/portable devices [96] (increased from 10% in 2001-2005 to 13% in 2006-2010) to detect Earth's magnetic field and small variations of magnetic field. A series of satellites were equipped with MR sensors for space exploration (4%) [134,231,232] by virtue of their reduced size and power consumption [242][243][244][245].…”

“…A series of satellites were equipped with MR sensors for space exploration (4%) [134,231,232] by virtue of their reduced size and power consumption [242][243][244][245]. MR sensors also exhibited their great compatibility with emerging technologies, such as PS and HCI (8%) in virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR) [96,246] and robotics [247].…”

“…The technological progress of MR sensors has resulted in a wide range of sensor applications, products, and services. These application areas require MR sensors with diverse properties, from high sensitivity and detectivity for biomedical applications , high mechanical flexibility and compactness for wearable/portable electronics , low power consumption and small physical dimension for position sensing (PS) [88][89][90][91] and human-computer interaction (HCI) [92][93][94][95][96][97][98][99][100][101], low cost and mass manufacturability for large-scale non-destructive evaluation and monitoring (NDEM) systems , to high accuracy and stability for navigation and transportation systems [123][124][125][126][127][128][129][130][131][132][133][134][135][136][137][138][139][140][141]. However, there is a lack of both an overview of the development of MR sensor applications and a strategic guide for future implementation of MR sensor technologies.…”

Wireless video sensor networks for sparse, resource-constrained, multi-robot teams

“…With our new LSP routing protocol, we can now implement a team of untethered robots that can transfer imagery from the frontier of the team's exploration back to the user. As part of an end-to-end system, we have developed a gestural joystick [24] to provide motions commands to one robot at a time and a PDA-based Host Controller Interface (HCI) for viewing the sensor data from the robot. It is assumed the other robots will be implementing autonomous behaviors while they are not communicating with the user.…”