Telerobotics is a relevant and emerging field of robotics, where a robot can be operated over distance by a human. Telepresence describes the situation of truly feeling present at the location of the robot in order to interact with the environment. Given this possibility, robots can be beneficially used in many areas, such as healthcare, military or disaster relief.
The project is part of the ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition, where the goal is to develop a telerobotics system that allows you to transfer your physical actions and motions to a different location, as well as makes you feel like you are at that location to interact with the environment and other people. As part of telemanipulating a humanoid robot, the body posture of the operator has to be captured and translated in a meaningful way. Body posture is a relevant part of communicating information in social contexts and e.g. showing human emotion when being present as a robotic avatar.
For this assignment, we will expand upon a working controller which exists out of a device connected to the hands of the human operator by implementing a sensor system to track the operator's upper body pose. The body posture of the operator needs to be registered and translated to motion command for the robotic avatar.