Bio-Inspired Interaction Control of Robotic Machines for Motor Therapy

摘要

However, impedance control requires an accurate knowledge of the dynamic parameters of the robotic system, in order to compensate the robot dynamics. This increases difficulties in implementing the control law and entails computational burden which may limit the field of application of this powerful technique. Thus, although applicable and adaptable to robot-aided motor therapy, control strategies derived from industrial robotics do not fully satisfy motor therapy requirements and substantial efforts are currently being devoted to robot design and control approaches purposely conceived for improving dependability in human-robot interaction Also biomorphic control techniques are being developed for such an application field that are inspired to recent neuroscientific findings on sensorimotor coordination and viscoelastic regulation in humans The control system of a machine for robot-aided neuro-rehabilitation is required to be highly adaptable and safe. In particular, the robot control system has to ensure a high level of adaptability to the different motor capabilities of the patients, properly relaxing the requirement of stiffness and precision in the motor task and remarking the maximum priority of safety in the interaction. Also, an ideal control system has to be portable, so to be easily instantiated on different types of rehabilitation machines, i.e., operational rehabilitation machines or else exoskeletal rehabilitation machines, still providing similar therapeutic performance by just readapting few parameters of the control law Finally, a good level of flexibility is needed for the machine to be prone to implement different motor tasks, with various kinematic and dynamic characteristics as required by different clinical research protocols. In particular, studies on the typical tasks of rehabilitation motor therapy have shown that, in view of the differences in the patient residual motor capabilities, at least three different operating modalities can be listed which the control has to be able to implement They are: