Mathematical modelling of a hand crank generator for powering lower-limb exoskeletons

SummaryWith advances in technology and ageing societal concerns growing, personal care devices are gaining importance globally. One such area is lower-limb exoskeletons, used to assist persons to move around for normal daily living. Most of the commercially available assistive exoskeletons use rechargeable Li-ion batteries, which require frequent charging to meet the operational needs. Charging becomes a problem when a person relying on a mobility exoskeleton has to go outdoors for shopping or a leisure walk. Experimental data from on-going research to develop assistive mobility exoskeletons for elderly persons indicates that, the power required for exoskeletons is around 45–60W which falls in the output range of hand-crank generators. So use of hand-crank generators as a charging source is discussed. In this work, we develop a mathematical model to investigate the potential of hand-crank devices in charging mobility exoskeletons and to give relation between input cranking speed and output charging power, and estimate the cranking time

Medico-surgical-rehab robots: fostering community interaction for safety, standards and regulatory issues

This workshop scope is to bring together experts in medico-surgical-rehabilitation robotics in order to discuss the ongoing issues regarding safety, to provide to the participants insight in the ongoing standardization activities, and to collect their live experience input for safety and standards, and regulatory issues, to criss cross the different point of view to produce valuable inputs of the European experts and projects for the standardization ISO working Groups. The discussion shall include the many aspects related to safety in this robotics area, the regulatory and legal aspects, the possible new approaches to risk assessment, software quality, physical and non physical interfaces, human factors, use cases. The field of medical robots including surgical and rehabilitation robotics is expanding with new market viable products implementing latest scientific results. The basic safety and essential performance requirements in this domain are referred to multiple areas: • on one side we need standards to build safe medical robot systems. This is vital because in the medical, surgical and rehabilitation field the robot is typically in direct contact with the exterior and interior of the human body and applies forces to the patient in different ways. This also implies the need for safe control systems, training issues and many other factors that can influence the overall “safety”. • on the other side the safety issues have to be weighed by the medical approach considering if the robotics technology is providing at least the same benefit for the patient as the traditional alternatives. • Multiple regulatory issues are involved that are strictly connected to the safety approach and to the technical implementation choices that are to be subsumed in the standard

Industrial and Medical Cyber-Physical Systems: Tackling User Requirements and Challenges in Robotics

Robotics is one of the major megatrends unfolding these days. Clearly, robots are capable of doing much more outside the factories than ever imagined, and that has a great impact on the whole society. This chapter provides some practical updates and guidelines on a few exciting aspects of automated technologies: applied robotics in the industry, in service and personal use and in the operating theaters, performing not only teleoperated surgeries but complex, delicate procedures as well. However, building reliable autonomous systems is not easy, and for another while, human operators will be required as a fallback option. Ensuring the safety of such hybrid control systems is complex, and requires novel human–machine interfaces. Situation awareness remains a key issue, keeping humans in the loop. Arguably, the social robotic sector is growing much faster than any industrial one, and as predicted, there soon will be robots in every household and around

Mooring Chain Climbing Robot For Ndt Inspection Applications

Inspection of mooring chains is a dangerous and costly procedure covering inspection above and below the waterline. The paper presents initial results from the RIMCAW project which was aimed at designing and building an inspection robot able to climb mooring chains and deploy NDT technologies for scanning individual links thereby to detecting critical defects. The paper focuses on the design and realisation of the inch worm type novel crawler developed and tested in the TWI Middlesbrough water tank

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This paper presents the activities of the CLAWAR TN project to identify the status for the area of applied robotics and how the traditional robotics industry can evolve to meet the wider needs of industry, society and citizens of the future. The modular philosophy that has been developed by the CLAWAR partnership using the concept of the interaction space is presented. This identifies the different types of inter-connections needed to design the components for achieving the connectivities and functionalities required for the robotic systems for specific applications. The results on the technical tasks carried out over the four years of the project are summarized and the current and future works of CLAWAR are also described. KEY WORDS—robot component, standards, plug-n-play, modularity, open components 1

Towards the development of international safety standards for human robot interaction

This paper is an overview of the work being performed by the ISO committee TC184/SC2 "Robots and Robotic Devices". SC2 is developing safety standards for robotic applications in personal and medical care, as well as revising existing industrial robot standards with requirements for new applications. A key driver of the new standards is the need for safety guidelines for human robot interaction, as the new applications involve much more extensive HRI behavior than previous generations of industrial robots. The paper summarizes the content of a revision to ISO 10218 for industrial robots, the development of a new standard ISO/NP 13482 for service robots in personal care, and discusses future work in standards for medical care robots and other areas. © Springer Science & Business Media BV 2010

Legal Issues for Mobile Servant Robots

This paper identifies key legal issues which are emerging for Mobile Servant Robots (MSRs), a sub-type of Personal Care Robots (PCR) defined in ISO 13482. New cases are likely to be introduced in the market soon even though appropriate and specific binding legal regulations regarding MSRs are missing and several questions need to be carefully considered. The main issues of concern are the need for a concrete and holistic definition of MSR, clarification on the confusion among new emerging ISO/IEC robot categories (especially between boundaries and gaps in machinery with medical device regulations), unclear liability scenarios (avoiding harm, prospective liability, butterfly effect), defining and regulating human-robot collaborations and relationships, ethical issues (mass surveillance, post-monitoring personal data), autonomy (from the robot but also from the user perspective), isolation scenarios, etc. Despite the recent technical advances, there is still a long way ahead and further research is needed to overcome a variety of associated legal and ethical issues which are emergin

Matlab/simMechanics based control of four-bar passive lower-body mechanism for rehabilitation

In recent times, use of wearable devices is becoming popular for providing precise ways of rehabilitation. The focus of this paper is to propose a passive lower body mechanism using a four-bar linkage, which can be actuated via the hip joint to move the other two joints at knee and ankle as well. Simulations are performed here by considering an average male human (height six feet) by modelling the gait cycle in CAD software and executing the control strategy in the SimMechanics, which provides a convenient way to study without use of detailed computational mathematics. The study of the controller aspects of the passive mechanism is presented with both PD and PID controllers with auto- and manual-tuned gains. Significant reduction in actuator torques is observed with the manually-tuned PID controller over automatically-tuned PID controller with marginal degradation in the overshoot and settling time