Motion capture from inertial sensing for untethered humanoid teleoperation

We describe the design of a modular system for untethered real-time kinematic motion capture using sensors with inertial measuring units (IMUs). Our system is comprised of a set of small and lightweight sensors. Each sensor provides its own global orientation (3 degrees of freedom) and is physically and computationally independent, requiring only external communication. Orientation information from sensors is communicated via wireless to host computer for processing. We present results of the real-time usage of our untethered motion capture system for teleoperating the NASA Robonaut(1). We also discuss potential applications for untethered motion capture with respect to humanoid robotics.