KUKAloha: A General, Low-Cost, and Shared-Control based Teleoperation Framework for Construction Robot Arm

2026-03-20

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenges of high cost, operational complexity, limited fine control, and insufficient safety in teleoperating large robotic arms within construction environments. To overcome these issues, the authors propose a master-slave shared control framework that combines intuitive human guidance via a lightweight leader arm for coarse motion with autonomous, vision-based precise localization and grasping using AprilTag markers. This approach innovatively decouples human coarse-level commands from robotic fine-level execution. Experimental validation on a KUKA robotic platform demonstrates that the system substantially reduces operator workload and enhances task efficiency, while offering advantages including low cost, strong generalizability, support for demonstration data collection, and stable human-robot collaborative operation.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Manipulation
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Replanning and Plan Repair
• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments

Abstract

This paper presents KUKAloha, a general, low-cost, and shared-control teleoperation framework designed for construction robot arms. The proposed system employs a leader-follower paradigm in which a lightweight leading arm enables intuitive human guidance for coarse robot motion, while an autonomous perception module based on AprilTag detection performs precise alignment and grasp execution. By explicitly decoupling human control from fine manipulation, KUKAloha improves safety and repeatability when operating large-scale manipulators. We implement the framework on a KUKA robot arm and conduct a usability study with representative construction manipulation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that KUKAloha reduces operator workload, improves task completion efficiency, and provides a practical solution for scalable demonstration collection and shared human-robot control in construction environments.

Problem

• teleoperation
• construction robot
• shared control
• human-robot collaboration
• manipulation

Innovation

• shared-control
• teleoperation
• leader-follower
• AprilTag detection
• construction robotics