Position Tracking of a Wireless Robotic Gripper with integrated IMU

The automation industry is one of the quickest developing branches of engineering that propose technological innovative solutions. In practice there is a growing need for implants to work faster, more reliable and to reduce the time for programming machines, such as robot arms. This project comes from a vision: a gripper detached from the robot that could be handled by the movement of a human hand. This method tears down the programming’s difficulty of the robot, because the only knowledge required is something as natural as a hand movement, while drastically reducing the programming time. This project consists of a feasibility analysis of such system through the use of an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) mounted on the gripper. The results have shown that a standalone IMU system for position tracking cannot be used for an enough-precise tracking of hand movements due to the drift coming from the double integration of the acceleration data. Therefore the system was enhanced by adding a camera and an Apriltags detection system as an external referencing system. The precision of the system created lies in the millimeter range.

Studienbetreuer: Ralf Legrand