10 accepted papers
Robots have surpassed humans in terms of strength and precision, yet humans retain an unparalleled ability for decision-making in the face of unpredictable disturbances. This article aims to combine the strengths of both entities within a singular task: human motion guidance under strict geometric c
In pursuit of effective robot-assisted rehabilitation, it is imperative that the robot facilitates rather than hinders the patient's self-movements in appropriate directions. This essential attribute, termed <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/x
Manipulability analysis is a methodology employed to assess the capacity of an articulated system, at a specific configuration, to produce motion or exert force in diverse directions. The conventional method entails generating a virtual ellipsoid using the system’s configuration and model. Yet, this…
Teleoperated robots are believed to play an important role for future applications in industry, medicine and other domains. Examples for this are remote assembly and maintenance, surgery, diagnosis or deep-sea and space exploration. Such applications are made possible by state-of-the-art tactile man…
There exist robotic tasks such as cumbersome object manipulation for which one arm alone is not sufficient and a team of robots should be employed. For such a multi-manual system, a control policy must be defined to meet the task objective. This letter presents a modular uni-arm control law for a mu
Ideally, a robot controller should not only be designed to exhibit a given interaction behavior under controlled conditions, but also to be robust to changes e.g. in the environment. Within the paradigm of virtual energy tanks for passivity-based controls, robustness may be provided by setting absol
In this paper we propose a novel energy-based control scheme for an assist-as-needed rehabilitation strategy, which both adapts the level of support based on patient participation and allows the patient to deviate from the prescribed motion in favor of his/her safety. We build an energy network mode…
Encoding desired motions into dynamic movement primitives (DMPs) is a common way for generating compact task representations that are able to handle sensor-based goal adaptations. At the same time, a robot should not only express adaptive motion capabilities at planning level, but use also contact w…
In this paper the concept of a unified torque/impedance controller is applied to a pneumatically actuated, antagonistic robot joint. The investigated control algorithm consists of a cascaded structure in which the outer torque/impedance controller commands a desired torque to two cylinder-based forc…
While collision detection and contact-related injury reduction in physical human-robot interaction has been studied intensively, safety issues in physical human-robot collaboration (pHRC) with continuous coupling of human and robot(s) has received little attention so far. We develop an energy monito