Man-machine interface using steering wheel and pedals for a quadruped walking robot

For an easier and natural teleoperation of the quadruped walking robots, a user interface is developed with a steering wheel and an assembly of pedals. In order to change the speed and the direction of the quadruped walking robots according to the operation of the steering wheel and the pedal, an online gait transition method is developed. Using this human-machine interface and online gait transition, the operator can control the quadruped walking robots almost in the same way as a driver drives a car. A quadruped walking robot named JROB-2 is used in the experiments. As the steering wheel is also equipped with various control buttons, it is possible to assign various single command tasks, like “stand up” and “sit down” etc., to these buttons and hence control the robot for these tasks without even touching the keyboard or mouse. The paper presents the details of this interface