Controlling the UR3 Robotic Arm Using a Leap Motion: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Each day, robotic systems are becoming more familiar and common in different contexts such as factories, hospitals, houses, and restaurants, creating a necessity of seeking for affordable and intuitive interface for effective and engaging communication with humans. Likewise, innovative devices that offer alternative methods of interacting with machines allow us to create new interfaces, improving the learning training and motion application. Thus, this paper compares two interaction modes using leap motion to control a robotic manipulator (UR3) simulator. Users can control the robot through numerical gestures to set up the angle joints (coded mode) or counter/clockwise gestures to increase or decrease the angle values (open mode). We evaluate these modes objectively, capturing from 30 subjects the number of gestures and employed time to reach three specific poses. Likewise, we collected subjective questionnaires to compare the control methods and preferences. Our findings suggest that both methods employ similar gestures, but coded control takes less time with higher variations among ages. Moreover, subjects’ preferences indicate a slight inclination towards the open mode. Finally, it is mandatory to explore different difficulties in the tasks and increase the population to have a more general understanding of the preferences and performance. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.