Biomechatronics: Harmonizing Mechatronic Systems with Human Beings

This eBook provides a comprehensive treatise on modern biomechatronic systems centred around human applications. A particular emphasis is given to exoskeleton designs for assistance and training with advanced interfaces in human-machine interaction. Some of these designs are validated with experimental results which the reader will find very informative as building-blocks for designing such systems. This eBook will be ideally suited to those researching in biomechatronic area with bio-feedback applications or those who are involved in high-end research on manmachine interfaces. This may also serve as a textbook for biomechatronic design at post-graduate level

Haptic Guidance for Extended Range Telepresence

A novel navigation assistance for extended range telepresence is presented. The haptic information from the target environment is augmented with guidance commands to assist the user in reaching desired goals in the arbitrarily large target environment from the spatially restricted user environment. Furthermore, a semi-mobile haptic interface was developed, one whose lightweight design and setup configuration atop the user provide for an absolutely safe operation and high force display quality

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

High Precision Constrained Grasping with Cooperative Adaptive Handcontrol

A method for high precision constrained object manoeuvering for non-redundant rigid multifinger hands is proposed. A passivity-based adaptive cooperative control scheme carries out compensation of all uncertain inertial and dynamic friction forces to guarantee asymptotic tracking of all contact forces and joint position-orientation trajectories over orthogonal force- and position-based impedance error manifolds. Optimal internal and external force trajectories are obtained to minimize the contact forces onto the constrained object while exerting a given desired contact force onto the environment. The simulation study of two robot fingers manipulating a constrained object for combined fast and slow velocity regimes shows that when the dynamic friction compensation is turned on tracking errors decrease tenfold