A Passivity-based Nonlinear Admittance Control with Application to Powered Upper-limb Control under Unknown Environmental Interactions

This paper presents an admittance controller based on the passivity theory for a powered upper-limb exoskeleton robot which is governed by the nonlinear equation of motion. Passivity allows us to include a human operator and environmental interaction in the control loop. The robot interacts with the human operator via F/T sensor and interacts with the environment mainly via end-effectors. Although the environmental interaction cannot be detected by any sensors (hence unknown), passivity allows us to have natural interaction. An analysis shows that the behavior of the actual system mimics that of a nominal model as the control gain goes to infinity, which implies that the proposed approach is an admittance controller. However, because the control gain cannot grow infinitely in practice, the performance limitation according to the achievable control gain is also analyzed. The result of this analysis indicates that the performance in the sense of infinite norm increases linearly with the control gain. In the experiments, the proposed properties were verified using 1 degree-of-freedom testbench, and an actual powered upper-limb exoskeleton was used to lift and maneuver the unknown payload.Comment: Accepted in IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics (T-MECH

INGENIOUS: the first responder of the future. A next generation integrated toolkit for collaborative response, increasing protection and augmenting operational capacity.

Comunicació presentada a: SafeCorfu 2019, the 6th International Conference on Civil Protection & New Technologies, celebrat a Corfu, Grècia, del 6 al 9 de novembre de 2019.The INGENIOUS project (EU Horizon 2020) aims to develop, integrate, test, deploy, demonstrate and validate a Next Generation Integrated Toolkit (NGIT) for Collaborative Response, which ensures high level of Protection & Augmented Operational Capacity to respond to the disaster scene. This will comprise a multitude of the tools and services required: 1) for enabling protection of the first responders with respect to their health, safety and security; 2) for enhancing their operational capacities by offering them with means to conduct various response tasks and missions boosted with autonomy, automation, precise positioning, optimal utilisation of available resources and upgraded awareness and sense‐making; 3) for allowing shared response across first responders teams and disciplines by augmenting their field of view, information sharing and communications between teams and with victims. The NGIT armours the FRs at all fronts, by delivering novel, affordable, accepted and customised response tools and services as part of their uniform and as part of their operational assets. The NGIT will be provided at the service of the FRs for extensive testing and validation (at component and Toolkit levels) in the framework of a rich Training, Testing and Validation Programme – of Lab Tests (LSTs), Small‐Scale Field Tests (SSTs) and Full‐Scale Field Validations (FSXs) – towards powering the FR of the future being fully aware, fully connected and fully integrated.This work is supported by the projects INGENIOUS, which has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 (H2020) programme under grant agreement No:833435

INGENIOUS: the first responder of the future. A next generation integrated toolkit for collaborative response, increasing protection and augmenting operational capacity.

Comunicació presentada a: SafeCorfu 2019, the 6th International Conference on Civil Protection & New Technologies, celebrat a Corfu, Grècia, del 6 al 9 de novembre de 2019.The INGENIOUS project (EU Horizon 2020) aims to develop, integrate, test, deploy, demonstrate and validate a Next Generation Integrated Toolkit (NGIT) for Collaborative Response, which ensures high level of Protection & Augmented Operational Capacity to respond to the disaster scene. This will comprise a multitude of the tools and services required: 1) for enabling protection of the first responders with respect to their health, safety and security; 2) for enhancing their operational capacities by offering them with means to conduct various response tasks and missions boosted with autonomy, automation, precise positioning, optimal utilisation of available resources and upgraded awareness and sense‐making; 3) for allowing shared response across first responders teams and disciplines by augmenting their field of view, information sharing and communications between teams and with victims. The NGIT armours the FRs at all fronts, by delivering novel, affordable, accepted and customised response tools and services as part of their uniform and as part of their operational assets. The NGIT will be provided at the service of the FRs for extensive testing and validation (at component and Toolkit levels) in the framework of a rich Training, Testing and Validation Programme – of Lab Tests (LSTs), Small‐Scale Field Tests (SSTs) and Full‐Scale Field Validations (FSXs) – towards powering the FR of the future being fully aware, fully connected and fully integrated.This work is supported by the projects INGENIOUS, which has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 (H2020) programme under grant agreement No:833435