Telerehabilitation of a Exoskeleton-haptic device System: Design and Evaluation on Stability and Transparency

While the presence and demand of robotic rehabilitation devices are rising, not many studies have been performed on haptic communication/ telerehabilitation with these devices. Despite therapists' desire to have the possibility to remain in the loop when their patients are performing exercises. This study aims to provide a telerehabilitation...

A Centralised Approach to Aerial Manipulation on Overhanging Surfaces

Aerial physical interaction opens the door for many operations at height to be automatised using aerial robots. This research presents a novel manipulator design mounted on a traditional quadrotor, which utilises both mechanical and software compliance to perform physical interaction on vertical walls and overhanging surfaces, such as those...

After a Decade of Teleimpedance: A Survey

Despite the significant progress made in making robots more intelligent and autonomous, today, teleoperation remains a dominant robot control paradigm for the execution of complex and highly unpredictable tasks. Attempts have been made to make teleoperation systems stable, easy to use, and efficient in terms of physical interactions between...

Model predictive impedance control with Gaussian processes for human and environment interaction

Robotic tasks which involve uncertainty – due to variation in goal, environment configuration, or confidence in task model – may require human input to instruct or adapt the robot. In tasks with physical contact, several existing methods for adapting robot trajectory or impedance according to individual uncertainties have been proposed, e.g.,...

Damping Design for Robot Manipulators

This paper studies the tuning process of controllers for fully actuated manipulators. To this end, we propose a methodology to design the desired damping matrix—alternatively, the derivative gain of a PD controller—of the closed-loop system such that n second-order systems can approximate its behavior with a prescribed damping coefficient,...

Robotic Skill Mutation in Robot-to-Robot Propagation During a Physically Collaborative Sawing Task

Skill propagation among robots without human involvement can be crucial in quickly spreading new physical skills to many robots. In this respect, it is a good alternative to pure reinforcement learning, which can be time-consuming, or learning from human demonstration, which requires human involvement. In the latter case, there may not be...

Safe Patient-Led Shoulder Rehabilitation with Biomechanical Model Integrated Collaborative Robot System

In this work, we propose a method for monitoring and management of rotator-cuff tendon strains in human-robot collaborative physical therapy for rotator cuff rehabilitation. The proposed approach integrates a complex offline biomechanical model with a collaborative, industrial robot arm and an impedance controller. The model is used for...

Learning to Pick at Non-Zero-Velocity from Interactive Demonstrations

This work investigates how the intricate task of a continuous pick & place (P&P) motion may be learned from humans based on demonstrations and corrections. Due to the complexity of the task, these demonstrations are often slow and even slightly flawed, particularly at moments when multiple aspects (i.e., end-effector movement,...

Interactive Imitation Learning for Force control: Position And Stiffness Teaching with Interactive Learning

To generalize the use of robotics, there are a few hurdles still to take. One of these hurdles is the programming of the robots. Most robots on the market today employ position control, with a set of controller parameters tuned by an expert. This programming is quite expensive, only suited for a single task, in a single configuration, and not...

Analysis of Coupling Effect in Human-Commanded Stiffness During Bilateral Tele-Impedance

Tele-impedance augments classic teleoperation by enabling the human operator to actively command remote robot stiffness in real-time, which is an essential ability to successfully interact with the unstructured and unpredictable environment. However, the literature is missing a study on benefits and drawbacks of different types of stiffness...

A Vision-based Semi-autonomous Impedance Control Method in Teleoperation

Teleoperation of a robot is often necessary when the remote site is not safe for humans. Moreover, to interact with dynamic environments safely, a teleoperation method called teleimpedance, which allows the human operator to control the impedance of the robot, is used. The main drawback of this method is that the human workload may increase....

The coupling effect in bilateral tele-impedance: Beneficial or detrimental for unstructured environment interaction?

Tele-impedance augments classical teleoperation by enabling the human operator to actively command remote robot stiffness. Hereby, an essential strategy used by humans to successfully interact with the unstructured environment complements remote robot-environment interaction. However, literature lacks awareness of benefits and disbenefits of...

Robust position-based impedance control of lightweight single-link flexible robots interacting with the unknown environment via a fractional-order sliding mode controller

This paper presents a fractional-order sliding mode control scheme equipped with a disturbance observer for robust impedance control of a single-link flexible robot arm when it comes into contact with an unknown environment. In this research, the impedance control problem is studied for both unconstrained and constrained maneuvers. The...

Piezo-Stepper actuator, Self-Sensing, Impedance Control

Piezo-Stepper actuators also called as piezowalk actuators find widespread application in precision mechatronic systems. This is primarily because of their high accuracy, long range of motion and compact volume. One such application is in the optical column manipulator of a lithography system. During operation, whenever a motion is desired...

The effect of impedance-controlled robotic gait training on walking ability and quality in individuals with chronic incomplete spinal cord injury: An explorative study

Background There is increasing interest in the use of robotic gait-training devices in walking rehabilitation of incomplete spinal cord injured (iSCI) individuals. These devices provide promising opportunities to increase the intensity of training and reduce physical demands on therapists. Despite these potential benefits, robotic gait-training...

Selective control of gait subtasks in robotic gait training: Foot clearance support in stroke survivors with a powered exoskeleton

Background Robot-aided gait training is an emerging clinical tool for gait rehabilitation of neurological patients. This paper deals with a novel method of offering gait assistance, using an impedance controlled exoskeleton (LOPES). The provided assistance is based on a recent finding that, in the control of walking, different modules can be...