Sensory Communication

Contains table of contents for Section 2 and reports on five research projects.National Institutes of Health Contract 2 R01 DC00117National Institutes of Health Contract 1 R01 DC02032National Institutes of Health Contract 2 P01 DC00361National Institutes of Health Contract N01 DC22402National Institutes of Health Grant R01-DC001001National Institutes of Health Grant R01-DC00270National Institutes of Health Grant 5 R01 DC00126National Institutes of Health Grant R29-DC00625U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-88-K-0604U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-91-J-1454U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-92-J-1814U.S. Navy - Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division Contract N61339-94-C-0087U.S. Navy - Naval Air Warfare Center Training System Division Contract N61339-93-C-0055U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-93-1-1198National Aeronautics and Space Administration/Ames Research Center Grant NCC 2-77

Haptics: Science, Technology, Applications

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Applications, EuroHaptics 2022, held in Hamburg, Germany, in May 2022. The 36 regular papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 129 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: haptic science; haptic technology; and haptic applications

Robotic simulators for tissue examination training with multimodal sensory feedback

Tissue examination by hand remains an essential technique in clinical practice. The effective application depends on skills in sensorimotor coordination, mainly involving haptic, visual, and auditory feedback. The skills clinicians have to learn can be as subtle as regulating finger pressure with breathing, choosing palpation action, monitoring involuntary facial and vocal expressions in response to palpation, and using pain expressions both as a source of information and as a constraint on physical examination. Patient simulators can provide a safe learning platform to novice physicians before trying real patients. This paper reviews state-of-the-art medical simulators for the training for the first time with a consideration of providing multimodal feedback to learn as many manual examination techniques as possible. The study summarizes current advances in tissue examination training devices simulating different medical conditions and providing different types of feedback modalities. Opportunities with the development of pain expression, tissue modeling, actuation, and sensing are also analyzed to support the future design of effective tissue examination simulators

Haptics: Science, Technology, Applications

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Applications, EuroHaptics 2020, held in Leiden, The Netherlands, in September 2020. The 60 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 111 submissions. The were organized in topical sections on haptic science, haptic technology, and haptic applications. This year's focus is on accessibility

Assessing Performance, Role Sharing, and Control Mechanisms in Human-Human Physical Interaction for Object Manipulation

abstract: Object manipulation is a common sensorimotor task that humans perform to interact with the physical world. The first aim of this dissertation was to characterize and identify the role of feedback and feedforward mechanisms for force control in object manipulation by introducing a new feature based on force trajectories to quantify the interaction between feedback- and feedforward control. This feature was applied on two grasp contexts: grasping the object at either (1) predetermined or (2) self-selected grasp locations (“constrained” and “unconstrained”, respectively), where unconstrained grasping is thought to involve feedback-driven force corrections to a greater extent than constrained grasping. This proposition was confirmed by force feature analysis. The second aim of this dissertation was to quantify whether force control mechanisms differ between dominant and non-dominant hands. The force feature analysis demonstrated that manipulation by the dominant hand relies on feedforward control more than the non-dominant hand. The third aim was to quantify coordination mechanisms underlying physical interaction by dyads in object manipulation. The results revealed that only individuals with worse solo performance benefit from interpersonal coordination through physical couplings, whereas the better individuals do not. This work showed that naturally emerging leader-follower roles, whereby the leader in dyadic manipulation exhibits significant greater force changes than the follower. Furthermore, brain activity measured through electroencephalography (EEG) could discriminate leader and follower roles as indicated power modulation in the alpha frequency band over centro-parietal areas. Lastly, this dissertation suggested that the relation between force and motion (arm impedance) could be an important means for communicating intended movement direction between biological agents.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Biomedical Engineering 201

Haptics: Science, Technology, Applications

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Applications, EuroHaptics 2020, held in Leiden, The Netherlands, in September 2020. The 60 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 111 submissions. The were organized in topical sections on haptic science, haptic technology, and haptic applications. This year's focus is on accessibility

A methodology for the Lower Limb Robotic Rehabilitation system

The overall goal of this thesis is to develop a new functional lower limb robot-assisted rehabilitation system for people with a paretic lower limb. A unilateral rehabilitation method is investigated, where the robot acts as an assistive device to provide the impaired leg therapeutic training through simulating the kinematics and dynamics of the ankle and lower leg movements. Foot trajectories of healthy subjects and post-stroke patients were recorded by a dedicated optical motion tracking system in a clinical gait measurement laboratory. A prototype 6 degrees of freedom parallel robot was initially built in order to verify capability of achieving singularity-free foot trajectories of healthy subjects in various exercises. This was then followed by building and testing another larger parallel robot to investigate the real-sized foot trajectories of patients. The overall results verify the designed robot’s capability in successfully tracking foot trajectories during different exercises. The thesis finally proposes a system of bilateral rehabilitation based on the concept of self-learning, where a passive parallel mechanism follows and records motion signatures of the patient’s healthy leg, and an active parallel mechanism provides motion for the impaired leg based on the kinematic mapping of the motion produced by the passive mechanism

A novel approach to user controlled ambulation of lower extremity exoskeletons using admittance control paradigm

The robotic lower extremity exoskeletons address the ambulatory problems confronting individuals with paraplegia. Paraplegia due to spinal cord injury (SCI) can cause motor deficit to the lower extremities leading to inability to walk. Though wheelchairs provide mobility to the user, they do not provide support to all activities of everyday living to individuals with paraplegia. Current research is addressing the issue of ambulation through the use of wearable exoskeletons that are pre-programmed. There are currently four exoskeletons in the U.S. market: Ekso, Rewalk, REX and Indego. All of the currently available exoskeletons have 2 active Degrees of Freedom (DOF) except for REX which has 5 active DOF. All of them have pre-programmed gait giving the user the ability to initiate a gait but not the ability to control the stride amplitude (height), stride frequency or stride length, and hence restricting users’ ability to navigate across different surfaces and obstacles that are commonly encountered in the community. Most current exoskeletons do not have motors for abduction or adduction to provide users with the option for movement in coronal plane, hence restricting user’s ability to effectively use the exoskeletons. These limitations of currently available pre-programmed exoskeleton models are sought to be overcome by an intuitive, real time user-controlled control mechanism employing admittance control by using hand-trajectory as a surrogate for foot trajectory. Preliminary study included subjects controlling the trajectory of the foot in a virtual environment using their contralateral hand. The study proved that hands could produce trajectories similar to human foot trajectories when provided with haptic and visual feedback. A 10 DOF 1/2 scale biped robot was built to test the control paradigm. The robot has 5 DOF on each leg with 2 DOF at the hip to provide flexion/extension and abduction/adduction, 1 DOF at the knee to provide flexion and 2 DOF at the ankle to provide flexion/extension and inversion/eversion. The control mechanism translates the trajectory of each hand into the trajectory of the ipsilateral foot in real time, thus providing the user with the ability to control each leg in both sagittal and coronal planes using the admittance control paradigm. The efficiency of the control mechanism was evaluated in a study using healthy subjects controlling the robot on a treadmill. A trekking pole was attached to each foot of the biped. The subjects controlled the trajectory of the foot of the biped by applying small forces in the direction of the required movement to the trekking pole through a force sensor. The algorithm converted the forces to Cartesian position of the foot in real time using admittance control; the Cartesian position was converted to joint angles of the hip and knee using inverse kinematics. The kinematics, synchrony and smoothness of the trajectory produced by the biped robot was evaluated at different speeds, with and without obstacles, and compared with typical walking by human subjects on the treadmill. Further, the cognitive load required to control the biped on the treadmill was evaluated and the effect of speed and obstacles with cognitive load on the kinematics, synchrony and smoothness was analyzed

Design, Control, and Perception of Bionic Legs and Exoskeletons

Bionic systems---wearable robots designed to replace, augment, or interact with the human body---have the potential to meaningfully impact quality of life; in particular, lower-limb prostheses and exoskeletons can help people walk faster, better, and safer. From a technical standpoint, there is a high barrier-to-entry to conduct research with bionic systems, limiting the quantity of research done; additionally, the constraints introduced by bionic systems often prohibit accurate measurement of the robot's output dynamics, limiting the quality of research done. From a scientific standpoint, we have begun to understand how people regulate lower-limb joint impedance (stiffness and damping), but not how they sense and perceive changes in joint impedance. To address these issues, I first present an open-source bionic leg prosthesis; I describe the design and testing process, and demonstrate patients meeting clinical ambulation goals in a rehabilitation hospital. Second, I develop tools to characterize open-loop impedance control systems and show how to achieve accurate impedance control without a torque feedback signal; additionally, I evaluate the efficiency of multiple bionic systems. Finally, I investigate how well people can perceive changes in the damping properties of a robot, similar to an exoskeleton. With this dissertation, I provide technical and scientific advances aimed at accelerating the field of bionics, with the ultimate goal of enabling meaningful impact with bionic systems.PHDMechanical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163108/1/afazocar_1.pd