An inertial haptic interface for robotic applications

Inertial measurement components, which sense either acceleration or angular rate, are being embedded into common user interface devices more frequently as their cost continues to drop dramatically. These devices hold a number of advantages over other sensing technologies: they measure relevant parameters for human interfaces and can easily be embedded into wireless, mobile platforms. The work of this project demonstrates that inertial measurement can be used to acquire rich data about human movements and gestures, that can be utilized to control any robotic systems or in videoludic purposes, i.e., consoles gamepad such as controller developed by Sony and Nintendo. A wireless six/nine degree-of-freedom inertial measurement unit (IMU) allows to collect the data, providing updates as fast as possible. Utilizing the acquired data, an elaboration algorithm provides the orientation of the sensor with respect an earth reference frame. These information can be used to control the movements of a robotic system, i.e., to control a quadcopter or to control a robotic arm. So, the sensor, supported by an intelligent unit, i.e. FPGA, results to be an inertial haptic interface, that can be introduced in videoludic, robotic and medical (i.e., inertial interface for assistant robots) applications. The choice of using the Altera FPGA technology is driven by the need to create:

• A real time control system, to process required algorithms in a minimum time
• An embedded system, in order to decrease the cost of the application in terms of both energy and space (required by the use of a personal computer), and to improve overall performance than using a banal microcontroller