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TECHNOLOGY AND CODE article

Front. Robot. AI
Sec. Human-Robot Interaction
Volume 11 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frobt.2024.1478016
This article is part of the Research Topic Wearables for Human-Robot Interaction & Collaboration View all articles

WearMoCap: Multimodal Pose Tracking for Ubiquitous Robot Control Using a Smartwatch

Provisionally accepted
  • 1 Arizona State University, Tempe, United States
  • 2 Procter & Gamble (United States), Cincinnati, Ohio, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    We present WearMoCap, an open-source library to track the human pose from smartwatch sensor data and leveraging pose predictions for ubiquitous robot control. WearMoCap operates in three modes: 1) a Watch Only mode, which uses a smartwatch only, 2) a novel Upper Arm mode, which utilizes the smartphone strapped onto the upper arm and 3) a Pocket mode, which determines body orientation from a smartphone in any pocket. We evaluate all modes on large-scale datasets consisting of recordings from up to 8 human subjects using a range of consumer-grade devices. Further, we discuss real-robot applications of underlying works and evaluate WearMoCap in handover and teleoperation tasks, resulting in performances that are within 2 cm of the accuracy of the gold-standard motion capture system. Our Upper Arm mode provides the most accurate wrist position estimates with a Root Mean Squared prediction error of 6.79 cm. To evaluate WearMoCap in more scenarios and investigate strategies to mitigate sensor drift, we publish the WearMoCap system with thorough documentation as open source.The system is designed to foster future research in smartwatch-based motion capture for robotics applications where ubiquity matters. www.github.com/wearable-motion-capture

    Keywords: motion capture, human-robot interaction, teleoperation, SmartWatch, wearables, Drone control, IMU Motion Capture

    Received: 09 Aug 2024; Accepted: 28 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Weigend, Kumar, Aran and Amor. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Fabian Clemens Weigend, Arizona State University, Tempe, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.