Studies on human motor control demonstrated the existence of simplifying strategies (namely ‘Donders’ law’) adopted to deal with kinematically redundant motor tasks. In recent research we showed that Donders’ law also holds for human wrist during pointing tasks, and that it is heavily perturbed when interacting with a highly back-drivable state-of-the-art rehabilitation robot. We hypothesized t...

Gait rehabilitation using body weight support on a treadmill is a recommended rehabilitation technique for neurological injuries, such as spinal cord injury. In this paper, a new robotic orthosis is presented for treadmill training. In the presented design the criteria such as low inertia of robot components, backdrivability, high safety and degrees of freedom based on human walking are conside...

The present paper investigates an intuitive way of robot path planning, called robot teaching by demonstration. In this method, an operator holds the robot end-effector and moves it through a number of positions and orientations in order to teach it a desired task. The presented control architecture applies impedance control in such a way that the end-effector follows the operator’s hand with d...

Pneumatic muscle is a new type of flexible actuator with advantages in terms of light weight, large output power/weight ratio, good security, low price and clean. In this paper, an ankle rehabilitation robot with two degrees of freedom driven by pneumatic muscle is studied. The force control method with an impedance controller in outer loop and a position inner loop is proposed. The demand of r...

Several interaction control algorithms have been proposed for physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) with the aim of assisting human movements. Some example are “path control” [4], “virtual model control” [7], “clime” [9] or gravity compensation [5], [3]. This class of algorithms is often built upon a force/torque controller that is supposed to be ideally fast. However when the algorithm is im...

In this paper, a singularity-free control methodology for the safe robot-human interaction is proposed using a hybrid control technique in robotic rehabilitation applications. With the use of max-plus algebra, a hybrid controller is designed to guarantee feasible robot motion in the vicinity of the kinematic singularities or going through and staying at the singular configuration. The approach ...

This paper presents the design, control and performance of a high fidelity four degree-of-freedom wrist exoskeleton robot, RiceWrist, for training and rehabilitation. The RiceWrist is intended to provide kinesthetic feedback during the training of motor skills or rehabilitation of reaching movements. Motivation for such applications is based on findings that show robot-assisted physical therapy...

The purpose of this paper is to propose the adaptive expert masssage robot using a multi-fingered robot. Towards this goal, the present paper gives a modeling of human skin muscle through robot perception of impedance, and control strategy using impedance control to implement adaptive control system, even if human condition is changed. The model validity is demonstrated via many experiments by ...

A desired dynamic behavior of constrained manipulators can be achieved by means of impedance control and various implementations of fixed controllers have been proposed. In this paper, and adaptive implementation is presented as an alternative to reduce the design sensitivity due to manipulator mismatch. The adaptive controller globally achieves the impedance objective for the nonlinear dynamic...