Let the Body Follow: Coupled Egocentric Control for Whole-Body Robot Teleoperation
Robotics
Summary
The authors designed a new way to control a robot that mimics a person's body movements more naturally. Instead of pressing buttons to move the robot's torso and base, the robot automatically moves based on the user's head and hand motions. They tested this method on a robot used for home care tasks and found that it made controlling the robot easier, faster, and less tiring compared to traditional methods. Users also liked this approach better and felt more confident while using it.
Authors
Tsung-Chi Lin, Yichen Xie, Chien-Ming Huang
Abstract
Whole-body teleoperation requires users to coordinate perception, manipulation, posture, and mobility across multiple robot components. This coordination is difficult because users must simultaneously control the robot's head, arms, torso, and base while maintaining task awareness and avoiding kinematic or environmental constraints. In this paper, we propose coupled egocentric control, a body-following teleoperation approach in which the robot's torso and base automatically respond to the operator's head and arm motions. Rather than requiring explicit touchpad commands for every torso or base adjustment, the system lets users focus on gaze and hand control: head pitch adjusts torso height, head yaw drives base rotation, end-effector height adjusts torso motion, and end-effector workspace boundaries trigger base translation. We evaluate this approach in a user study on whole-body teleoperation of a TIAGo mobile manipulator for home-care-inspired tasks. Compared with a baseline hybrid interface, coupled egocentric control improves object manipulation efficiency, reduces button-based control effort and arm singularities, lowers mental demand and overall workload, and increases ease of use, ease of learning, confidence, and user preference for torso and base control.