Exoskeleton for Tele-Operation of Industrial Robot Sudipto Mukherjee Department of Mechanical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Delhi New Delhi, India sudipto@mech.iitd.ac.in Mohd. Zubair Department of Mechanical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Delhi New Delhi, India mdzubair87@gmail.com Bhivraj Suthar Department of Mechanical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Delhi New Delhi, India bhivraj.iitd@gmail.com Sachin Kansal Department of Mechanical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Delhi New Delhi, India sachinkansal87@gmail.com ABSTRACT An upper limb exoskeleton is being used as master for tele- operation designed to control KUKA KR5 robot that is not directly accessible. Design and implementation issues for this task have been discussed. The connectivity is through .NET remoting, gravity balancing with springs and compacts solutions for alignments of collocated shafts have been achieved through design. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.1.1 [Applicative (Functional) Programming], D.2.2 [Design Tools & Techniques]: Evolutionary prototyping, D.2.10 [Design]: Methodologies, J.6 [COMPUTER-AIDED ENGINEERING]: Computer-aided design (CAD). General Terms Design, Human factor, Measurement, Verification. Keywords Tele-operation, Remoting, Kuka KR5, Gravity Balancing. 1. INTRODUCTION Tele-operation is the process of operating a machine at a distance. In situations like space applications or disasters we encounter situations where the environment is hazardous to human health. It is expedient to deploy robots in such locations. Their motion is controlled by human operators positioned at a safe distance from hazard centers with radiation and chemicals. In space programs, the rovers on other planets are controlled remotely from earth. Recently in Japan, after the damage caused by the tsunami and the earthquake, robots were deployed for shutting down the nuclear plants and carrying out rescue missions. However, even for seemingly innocuous tasks like inserting a peg in a hole, it is difficult to provide instructions in the form of a predefined algorithm. Currently, we are to go a long way before we can make task planning systems matching the human brain, telepresence provides us with a convenient approach to deal with certain class of applications. There have been successful implementations of human arm exoskeleton [1, 2, 3, and 4]. The controlling device may be a mouse, a joystick or a steering wheel. To make the interface more intuitive, it can be a wearable robot or exoskeleton as shown in Figure 1. Although there have been attempts to track arm movements without exoskeleton, such an approach fails to provide for a feedback system [5]. Figure 1. Exoskeleton for teleoperation This paper describes engineering the systematically improve on the first version in figure 1, specifically to ensure better alignment, haptic feedback and enhance user comfort. 2. KINEMATICS DESIGN Our work focuses on an exoskeleton which has been developed (Figure 1) to be worn on a human arm, and provide the necessary information for effectively controlling an industrial robot through hand motion. The application targeted is a peg in a hole insertion, which is to be carried out by a KUKA KR5 ARC Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org . AIR '13, July 04 - 06 2013, Pune, India Copyright 2013 ACM 978-1-4503-2347-5/13/07…$15.00. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2506095.2506108