Teleoperation of a Humanoid Robot with Motion Imitation and Legged Locomotion

Abstract: This work presents a teleoperated humanoid robot system that can imitate human motions, walk and turn. To capture human motions, a Microsoft Kinect Depth sensor is used. Unlike the cumbersome motion capture suits, the sensor makes the system more comfortable to interact with. The skeleton data is extracted from the Kinect which is processed to generate the robot's joint angles. Robot Operating System (ROS) is used for the communication between the various parts of the code to achieve minimal latency. Thus the robot imitates the human in real-time with negligible lag. Unlike most of the human motion imitation systems, this system is not stationary. The lower body motions of the user are captured and processed and used to make the robot walk forward, backward and to make it turn right or left thus enabling a completely dynamic teleoperated humanoid robot system.