Human guided trajectory and impedance adaptation for tele-operated physical assistance

Abstract

Human physical assistance requires the assistant to tune both his trajectory and impedance in order to assist an individual as well as be guided by him. In this study we propose a controller for teleoperated human assistance that allows the assistant to guide the assisting robot in both trajectory and impedance. We propose to use the inherent perturbations in the task, induced by the elderly or stroke patient, for impedance estimation, while a simple neuroscience based filter allows the reference estimation of the operator. We tested our impedance estimation and the controller as a whole in two experiments in which a human operator guided a robot suffering force perturbations that simulated a human patient.