Human arm motion tracking using IMU measurements in a robotic environnement

Human-robot interactions (HRI) is an emerging paradigm that aims at combining complementary skills of robot and human. The meaningful human arm motion represent an interesting way of communication to explore with robot. IMUs appear as a simple, lightweight, easy-to-use, technology for human motion tracking compared to other systems such as opto-electronic devices. However, IMUs require important data treatement to reconstruct human motion and are usually coupled with a magnetometer or even other sensors. This paper explores a method only based on IMUs (accelerometer and gyroscope) to track human motion in order to keep the simplicity and robustness of IMUs in an industrial environnement with magnetic disturbances. The signal processing method presented here limit the well-known drift of the gyroscope by gravity measurement.