Human–robot interaction represents a critical factor in the design of personal robots as well as in the implementation of robot behavior and control. This work investigates and proposes solutions to the problem of controlling an anthropomorphic robot arm for personal assistance, by dealing with the peculiarities of its design, i.e. the mechanics of its cable-actuated, intrinsically compliant st...

Assist-as-needed (AAN) control aims at promoting therapeutic outcomes in robot-assisted rehabilitation by encouraging patients' active participation. Impedance is used most AAN controllers to create a compliant force field around target motion ensure tracking accuracy while allowing moderate kinematic errors. However, since the parameters governing shape of are often tuned manually or adapted o...

Successful execution of many robotic tasks requires precise control of robot motion and its interaction with the environment. In robotics these two problems are mainly studied separately in the domain of robot motion generation and interaction control, respectively. Existing approaches rely on two control loops: a motion generator (planner) that provides a reference trajectory in the outer loop...

The authors have developed wrist rehabilitation robot for hemiplegic patients. The robot is much effective for repetitive rehabilitation, and useful for patients. Mirror effect control system is developed based on the experience that a patient can easily move a limb while moving a limb on the other side. The effectiveness is successfully confirmed by the practical test in the hospital. Introduc...

In order to properly control rehabilitation robotic devices, the measurement of interaction force and motion between patient and robot is an essential part. Usually, however, this is a complex task that requires the use of accurate sensors which increase the cost and the complexity of the robotic device. In this work, we address the development of virtual sensors that can be used as an alternat...

The mechanical impedance of the human ankle plays a central role in lower-extremity functions requiring physical interaction with the environment. Recent efforts in the design of lower-extremity assistive robots have focused on the sagittal plane; however, the human ankle functions in both sagittal and frontal planes. While prior work has addressed ankle mechanical impedance in single degrees o...

In this paper we present the implementation of a Cartesian impedance control method to regulate the interaction forces between a robotic arm and the environment. A complete description of the procedure to model and control both a two-link planar robot arm and its interaction with the environment is detailed and simulated using MATLAB/Simulink; from the generation of a mechanical model in SimMec...

This article presents the implementation of a new algorithm of force guided motions with a six axis articulated robot frequently used in research laboratories. This new approach is based on the idea of impedance control in joint space and it is implemented on a digital signal processor-based robot controller. It allows an intuitive force guidance of the robot by taking the gripper by the hand. ...