Virtualization of Robotic Hands Using Mobile Devices

This article presents a multiplatform application for the tele-operation of a robot hand using virtualization in Unity 3D. This approach grants usability to users that need to control a robotic hand, allowing supervision in a collaborative way. This paper focuses on a user application designed for the 3D virtualization of a robotic hand and the tele-operation architecture. The designed system allows for the simulation of any robotic hand. It has been tested with the virtualization of the four-fingered Allegro Hand of SimLab with 16 degrees of freedom, and the Shadow hand with 24 degrees of freedom. The system allows for the control of the position of each finger by means of joint and Cartesian co-ordinates. All user control interfaces are designed using Unity 3D, such that a multiplatform philosophy is achieved. The server side allows the user application to connect to a ROS (Robot Operating System) server through a TCP/IP socket, to control a real hand or to share a simulation of it among several users. If a real robot hand is used, real-time control and feedback of all the joints of the hand is communicated to the set of users. Finally, the system has been tested with a set of users with satisfactory results.