A Preliminary Study on Robot-Assisted Ankle Rehabilitation for the Treatment of Drop Foot

This paper involves the use of a compliant ankle rehabilitation robot (CARR) for the treatment of drop foot. The robot has a bio-inspired design by employing four Festo Fluidic muscles (FFMs) that mimic skeletal muscles actuating three rotational degrees of freedom (DOFs). A trajectory tracking controller was developed in joint task space to track the predefined trajectory of the end effector. This controller was achieved by controlling individual FFM length based on inverse kinematics. Three patients with drop foot participated in a preliminary study to evaluate the potential of the CARR for clinical applications. Ankle stretching exercises along ankle dorsiflexion and plantarflexion (DP) were delivered for treating drop foot. All patients gave positive feedback in using this ankle robot for the treatment of drop foot, although some limitations exist. The proposed controller showed satisfactory accuracy in trajectory tracking, with all root mean square deviation (RMSD) values no greater than 0.0335 rad and normalized root mean square deviation (NRMSD) values less than 6.7%. These preliminary findings support the potentials of the CARR for clinical applications. Future work will investigate the effectiveness of the robot for treating drop foot on a large sample of subjects

Planning and Control Strategies for Motion and Interaction of the Humanoid Robot COMAN+

Despite the majority of robotic platforms are still confined in controlled environments such as factories, thanks to the ever-increasing level of autonomy and the progress on human-robot interaction, robots are starting to be employed for different operations, expanding their focus from uniquely industrial to more diversified scenarios. Humanoid research seeks to obtain the versatility and dexterity of robots capable of mimicking human motion in any environment. With the aim of operating side-to-side with humans, they should be able to carry out complex tasks without posing a threat during operations. In this regard, locomotion, physical interaction with the environment and safety are three essential skills to develop for a biped. Concerning the higher behavioural level of a humanoid, this thesis addresses both ad-hoc movements generated for specific physical interaction tasks and cyclic movements for locomotion. While belonging to the same category and sharing some of the theoretical obstacles, these actions require different approaches: a general high-level task is composed of specific movements that depend on the environment and the nature of the task itself, while regular locomotion involves the generation of periodic trajectories of the limbs. Separate planning and control architectures targeting these aspects of biped motion are designed and developed both from a theoretical and a practical standpoint, demonstrating their efficacy on the new humanoid robot COMAN+, built at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia. The problem of interaction has been tackled by mimicking the intrinsic elasticity of human muscles, integrating active compliant controllers. However, while state-of-the-art robots may be endowed with compliant architectures, not many can withstand potential system failures that could compromise the safety of a human interacting with the robot. This thesis proposes an implementation of such low-level controller that guarantees a fail-safe behaviour, removing the threat that a humanoid robot could pose if a system failure occurred

Hierarchical Compliance Control of a Soft Ankle Rehabilitation Robot Actuated by Pneumatic Muscles

Traditional compliance control of a rehabilitation robot is implemented in task space by using impedance or admittance control algorithms. The soft robot actuated by pneumatic muscle actuators (PMAs) is becoming prominent for patients as it enables the compliance being adjusted in each active link, which, however, has not been reported in the literature. This paper proposes a new compliance control method of a soft ankle rehabilitation robot that is driven by four PMAs configured in parallel to enable three degrees of freedom movement of the ankle joint. A new hierarchical compliance control structure, including a low-level compliance adjustment controller in joint space and a high-level admittance controller in task space, is designed. An adaptive compliance control paradigm is further developed by taking into account patient’s active contribution and movement ability during a previous period of time, in order to provide robot assistance only when it is necessarily required. Experiments on healthy and impaired human subjects were conducted to verify the adaptive hierarchical compliance control scheme. The results show that the robot hierarchical compliance can be online adjusted according to the participant’s assessment. The robot reduces its assistance output when participants contribute more and vice versa, thus providing a potentially feasible solution to the patient-in-loop cooperative training strateg

Robot-assisted ankle rehabilitation for the treatment of drop foot: A case study

This paper involves the use of an intrinsically-compliant ankle rehabilitation robot for the treatment of drop foot. The robot has a bio-inspired design by employing four Festo fluidic actuators that mimic skeletal muscles to actuate three rotational degrees of freedom (DOFs). A position controller in task space was developed to track the predefined trajectory of the end effector. The position tracking was achieved by the length tracking of each actuator in joint space by inverse kinematics. A stroke patient with drop foot participated in the trial as a case study to evaluate the potential of this robot for clinical applications. The patient gave positive feedback in using the ankle robot for the treatment of drop foot, although some limitations exist. The trajectory tracking showed satisfactory accuracy throughout the whole training with varying ranges of motion, with the root mean square deviation (RMSD) value being 0.0408 rad and the normalized root mean square deviation (NRMSD) value being 8.16%. To summarize, preliminary findings support the potential of the ankle rehabilitation robot for clinical applications. Future work will investigate the effectiveness of the robot for treating drop foot on a large sample of subjects