The authors developed a robot arm that could be controlled by a verbal joystick. First they made a 2D model on the computer and made sure they could control it. A test was run to find the best mode of control., forward kinematic (controlling each joint independently), inverse kinematic (designing for only an end result, not caring about individual joints), or a hybrid control method. The end result showed that people with limited experience, since it was a new devise to the testers, preferred an inverse kinematic design, not wanting to thinking about the angles of the angles of the arm and have it just work.
The robot arm is a hobbyist arm called the Lynx 6. It is controlled with two modes, position mode and orientation mode. Position mode controls the arm's position while orientation mode controls the gripper. Again, inverse kinematic design prevailed over other options when put to a usability test.
This project is very important to the expansion of handicap persons' capabilities. This allows people to control robotics and other things with simple verbal commands that are non-language specific. This would be very awkward to operate in public, but in a work environment it could boost productivity of handicapped people immensely. With further development this project could actually become user friendly and deployable to a commercial environment. Much of the work left to do on this expansion of the verbal joystick is in usability tests and tweaking algorithms to make the controls easier to learn and use.
I thought this was pretty cool. It could be of great use to handicapped people. I do think that looking on, it would be kind of weird. Your operating this mechanical arm and it sounds almost like your singing. Plus, how would you remember the mapping for that? I have no idea.
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