129 research outputs found
Physical Human-Robot Interaction Control of an Upper Limb Exoskeleton with a Decentralized Neuro-Adaptive Control Scheme
Within the concept of physical human-robot interaction (pHRI), the most
important criterion is the safety of the human operator interacting with a high
degree of freedom (DoF) robot. Therefore, a robust control scheme is in high
demand to establish safe pHRI and stabilize nonlinear, high DoF systems. In
this paper, an adaptive decentralized control strategy is designed to
accomplish the abovementioned objectives. To do so, a human upper limb model
and an exoskeleton model are decentralized and augmented at the subsystem level
to enable a decentralized control action design. Moreover, human exogenous
force (HEF) that can resist exoskeleton motion is estimated using radial basis
function neural networks (RBFNNs). Estimating both human upper limb and robot
rigid body parameters, along with HEF estimation, makes the controller
adaptable to different operators, ensuring their physical safety. The barrier
Lyapunov function (BLF) is employed to guarantee that the robot can operate in
a safe workspace while ensuring stability by adjusting the control law. Unknown
actuator uncertainty and constraints are also considered in this study to
ensure a smooth and safe pHRI. Then, the asymptotic stability of the whole
system is established by means of the virtual stability concept and virtual
power flows (VPFs) under the proposed robust controller. The experimental
results are presented and compared to proportional-derivative (PD) and
proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers. To show the robustness of
the designed controller and its good performance, experiments are performed at
different velocities, with different human users, and in the presence of
unknown disturbances. The proposed controller showed perfect performance in
controlling the robot, whereas PD and PID controllers could not even ensure
stable motion in the wrist joints of the robot
Use of human gestures for controlling a mobile robot via adaptive CMAC network and fuzzy logic controller
Mobile robots with manipulators have been more and more commonly applied in extreme and hostile environments to assist or even replace human operators for complex tasks. In addition to autonomous abilities, mobile robots need to facilitate the human–robot interaction control mode that enables human users to easily control or collaborate with robots. This paper proposes a system which uses human gestures to control an autonomous mobile robot integrating a manipulator and a video surveillance platform. A human user can control the mobile robot just as one drives an actual vehicle in the vehicle’s driving cab. The proposed system obtains human’s skeleton joints information using a motion sensing input device, which is then recognized and interpreted into a set of control commands. This is implemented, based on the availability of training data set and requirement of in-time performance, by an adaptive cerebellar model articulation controller neural network, a finite state machine, a fuzzy controller and purposely designed gesture recognition and control command generation systems. These algorithms work together implement the steering and velocity control of the mobile robot in real-time. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to conveniently control a mobile robot using virtual driving method, with smooth manoeuvring trajectories in various speeds
Iterative Machine Learning for Precision Trajectory Tracking with Series Elastic Actuators
When robots operate in unknown environments small errors in postions can lead
to large variations in the contact forces, especially with typical
high-impedance designs. This can potentially damage the surroundings and/or the
robot. Series elastic actuators (SEAs) are a popular way to reduce the output
impedance of a robotic arm to improve control authority over the force exerted
on the environment. However this increased control over forces with lower
impedance comes at the cost of lower positioning precision and bandwidth. This
article examines the use of an iteratively-learned feedforward command to
improve position tracking when using SEAs. Over each iteration, the output
responses of the system to the quantized inputs are used to estimate a
linearized local system models. These estimated models are obtained using a
complex-valued Gaussian Process Regression (cGPR) technique and then, used to
generate a new feedforward input command based on the previous iteration's
error. This article illustrates this iterative machine learning (IML) technique
for a two degree of freedom (2-DOF) robotic arm, and demonstrates successful
convergence of the IML approach to reduce the tracking error.Comment: 9 pages, 16 figure. Submitted to AMC Worksho
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
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