7-degree-of-freedom hybrid-manipulator exoskeleton for lower-limb motion capture

Lower-limb exoskeletons are wearable robotic systems with a kinematic structure closely matching that of the human leg. In part, this technology can be used to provide clinical assessment and improved independent-walking competency for people living with the effects of stroke, spinal cord injury, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and sarcopenia. Individually, these demographics represent approximately: 405 thousand, 100 thousand, 67.5 thousand, 100 thousand, and 5.9 million Canadians, respectively. Key shortcomings in the current state-of-the-art are: restriction on several of the human leg’s primary joint movements, coaxial joint alignments at the exoskeleton-human interface, and exclusion of well-suited parallel manipulator components. A novel exoskeleton design is thus formulated to address these issues while maintaining large ranges of joint motion. Ultimately, a single-leg unactuated prototype is constructed for seven degree-of-freedom joint angle measurements; it achieves an extent of motion-capture accuracy comparable to a commercial inertial-based system during three levels of human mobility testing

Contemporary Robotics

This book book is a collection of 18 chapters written by internationally recognized experts and well-known professionals of the field. Chapters contribute to diverse facets of contemporary robotics and autonomous systems. The volume is organized in four thematic parts according to the main subjects, regarding the recent advances in the contemporary robotics. The first thematic topics of the book are devoted to the theoretical issues. This includes development of algorithms for automatic trajectory generation using redudancy resolution scheme, intelligent algorithms for robotic grasping, modelling approach for reactive mode handling of flexible manufacturing and design of an advanced controller for robot manipulators. The second part of the book deals with different aspects of robot calibration and sensing. This includes a geometric and treshold calibration of a multiple robotic line-vision system, robot-based inline 2D/3D quality monitoring using picture-giving and laser triangulation, and a study on prospective polymer composite materials for flexible tactile sensors. The third part addresses issues of mobile robots and multi-agent systems, including SLAM of mobile robots based on fusion of odometry and visual data, configuration of a localization system by a team of mobile robots, development of generic real-time motion controller for differential mobile robots, control of fuel cells of mobile robots, modelling of omni-directional wheeled-based robots, building of hunter- hybrid tracking environment, as well as design of a cooperative control in distributed population-based multi-agent approach. The fourth part presents recent approaches and results in humanoid and bioinspirative robotics. It deals with design of adaptive control of anthropomorphic biped gait, building of dynamic-based simulation for humanoid robot walking, building controller for perceptual motor control dynamics of humans and biomimetic approach to control mechatronic structure using smart materials

Rehabilitation Engineering

Population ageing has major consequences and implications in all areas of our daily life as well as other important aspects, such as economic growth, savings, investment and consumption, labour markets, pensions, property and care from one generation to another. Additionally, health and related care, family composition and life-style, housing and migration are also affected. Given the rapid increase in the aging of the population and the further increase that is expected in the coming years, an important problem that has to be faced is the corresponding increase in chronic illness, disabilities, and loss of functional independence endemic to the elderly (WHO 2008). For this reason, novel methods of rehabilitation and care management are urgently needed. This book covers many rehabilitation support systems and robots developed for upper limbs, lower limbs as well as visually impaired condition. Other than upper limbs, the lower limb research works are also discussed like motorized foot rest for electric powered wheelchair and standing assistance device

Design of Wheelchair Robot for Active Postural Support (WRAPS) for Users with Trunk Impairments

People with severe trunk impairments cannot maintain or control upright posture during sitting or reaching out with the upper body. Passive orthoses are clinically available to support the trunk and promote the use of upper extremities in this population. However, these orthoses only rigidly position the torso on a wheelchair but do not facilitate movement of the trunk. In this dissertation, we introduce a novel active-assistive torso brace system for upperbody movements by a subject while seated. We have named this system as Wheelchair Robot for Active Postural Support (WRAPS). We propose designs of two robots, one for the pelvis and the other for the trunk. Each of the two devices has a parallel chain architecture to accommodate the range of motion (ROM), respectively for the pelvic and thoracic segments. The first thoracic robot was designed for the upper trunk motion relative to the pelvis. It has a 2[RP]S-2UPS architecture which provides four degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) to the end-effector placed on the upper trunk. The second is a pelvic robot which is designed to orient the pelvic segment relative to the seat. It has a 3-DOF [RRR]U-2[RR]S architecture, coupled with translation to accommodate pelvic movements relative to the seat. These robot architectures are synthesized based on human movement data. WRAPS can modulate the displacement of both the pelvic and the thoracic segments. Additionally, the forces can be applied on the torso through the end-effectors of these robots. Each of the robot prototypes was evaluated with able-bodied subjects to assess the device wearability, kinematic performances, and control system

Development and Characterization of Velocity Workspaces for the Human Knee.

The knee joint is the most complex joint in the human body. A complete understanding of the physical behavior of the joint is essential for the prevention of injury and efficient treatment of infirmities of the knee. A kinematic model of the human knee including bone surfaces and four major ligaments was studied using techniques pioneered in robotic workspace analysis. The objective of this work was to develop and test methods for determining displacement and velocity workspaces for the model and investigate these workspaces. Data were collected from several sources using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT). Geometric data, including surface representations and ligament lengths and insertions, were extracted from the images to construct the kinematic model. Fixed orientation displacement workspaces for the tibia relative to the femur were computed using ANSI C programs and visualized using commercial personal computer graphics packages. Interpreting the constraints at a point on the fixed orientation displacement workspace, a corresponding velocity workspace was computed based on extended screw theory, implemented using MATLAB(TM), and visually interpreted by depicting basis elements. With the available data and immediate application of the displacement workspace analysis to clinical settings, fixed orientation displacement workspaces were found to hold the most promise. Significant findings of the velocity workspace analysis include the characterization of the velocity workspaces depending on the interaction of the underlying two-systems of the constraint set, an indication of the contributions from passive constraints to force closure of the joint, computational means to find potentially harmful motions within the model, and realistic motions predicted from solely geometric constraints. Geometric algebra was also investigated as an alternative method of representing the underlying mathematics of the computations with promising results. Recommendations for improving and continuing the research may be divided into three areas: the evolution of the knee model to allow a representation for cartilage and the menisci to be used in the workspace analysis, the integration of kinematic data with the workspace analysis, and the development of in vivo data collection methods to foster validation of the techniques outlined in this dissertation

Simulating Humans: Computer Graphics, Animation, and Control

People are all around us. They inhabit our home, workplace, entertainment, and environment. Their presence and actions are noted or ignored, enjoyed or disdained, analyzed or prescribed. The very ubiquitousness of other people in our lives poses a tantalizing challenge to the computational modeler: people are at once the most common object of interest and yet the most structurally complex. Their everyday movements are amazingly uid yet demanding to reproduce, with actions driven not just mechanically by muscles and bones but also cognitively by beliefs and intentions. Our motor systems manage to learn how to make us move without leaving us the burden or pleasure of knowing how we did it. Likewise we learn how to describe the actions and behaviors of others without consciously struggling with the processes of perception, recognition, and language

Advances in Robot Kinematics : Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Advances in Robot Kinematics

International audienceThe motion of mechanisms, kinematics, is one of the most fundamental aspect of robot design, analysis and control but is also relevant to other scientific domains such as biome- chanics, molecular biology, . . . . The series of books on Advances in Robot Kinematics (ARK) report the latest achievement in this field. ARK has a long history as the first book was published in 1991 and since then new issues have been published every 2 years. Each book is the follow-up of a single-track symposium in which the participants exchange their results and opinions in a meeting that bring together the best of world’s researchers and scientists together with young students. Since 1992 the ARK symposia have come under the patronage of the International Federation for the Promotion of Machine Science-IFToMM.This book is the 13th in the series and is the result of peer-review process intended to select the newest and most original achievements in this field. For the first time the articles of this symposium will be published in a green open-access archive to favor free dissemination of the results. However the book will also be o↵ered as a on-demand printed book.The papers proposed in this book show that robot kinematics is an exciting domain with an immense number of research challenges that go well beyond the field of robotics.The last symposium related with this book was organized by the French National Re- search Institute in Computer Science and Control Theory (INRIA) in Grasse, France