Cooperative Assistive Robotic Systems with Haptic Feedback: Sensing and Control

在过去的几十年里，随着机器人需要完成更复杂的工作，协作辅助机器人系统和技术受到了越来越多的关注。关于协作辅助机器人系统的传感、控制和优化的拟议工作解决了控制研究人员所面临的主要挑战和机遇之一。研究成果将为合作机器人系统的开发奠定基础，该系统在工业制造、军事应用、环境监测、交通运输、空间探索、医疗应用和医疗保健服务中具有潜在的应用前景。拟议的研究结果将有助于该行业提供运营便利和提高经济效益，并为需要医疗干预和身体援助的人提供好处。与单个机器人相比，协作机器人系统具有更高的灵活性、更好的处理能力、更大的负载能力以及由于冗余而增强的健壮性。由于整个系统的复杂性，许多现有的工作缺乏一个良好的协调策略框架。传感和控制这两个关键组件的集成并未得到优化，需要针对特定应用进行协同设计。在未知环境模型、动力学、对动态环境的协调机制、传感器不完善、通信约束、性能评价指标等方面还没有得到很好的解决。 这项研究的短期目标是：开发分别用于制造、医疗和康复的具有触觉反馈的辅助机器人平台，以及在存在有限测量、不确定性和干扰的情况下基于感知的运动控制；针对单个机器人不足以完成灵活任务的协作任务，提出多种协作控制策略，并定义评估如何达成协作协议的性能指标，在通信约束下优化多源反馈的有用信息，以及解决多机器人系统之间的鲁棒性和综合问题。 具体地说，需要研究的问题有：1)具有触觉反馈的辅助机器人系统--感知和运动控制；2)具有触觉反馈的多辅助机器人系统的协同控制。具体地说，将研究三种应用：i)协作移动机械手；ii)协作外科机器人装置，用于在受限的工作空间中执行具有触觉反馈的任务；iii)协作可穿戴外骨骼机器人装置，用于康复。

With the need to accomplish more complicated work by robots, increasing attention has been paid to cooperative assistive robotics systems and technologies over the past decades. The proposed work on sensing, control and optimization of cooperative assistive robotic systems addresses one of the recognized major challenges and opportunities for control researchers. The results of the research will lay the ground work for the development of cooperative robotic systems with potential applications in industrial manufacturing, military applications, environmental monitoring, transportation, space exploration, medical applications and health care services. The results of the proposed research will help the industry to offer operating convenience and increase economic efficiency, as well as offer benefit to people required medical interventions and physical assistance. Cooperative robotic systems have advantages over a single robot, such as increased dexterity, improved handling capability, increased loading capacity and enhanced robustness due to redundancy. Much existing work lacks a good framework for coordination strategies due to the complexity of the whole system. The integration of two key components, sensing and control, is not optimized and needs co-design for specific applications. The issues related to unknown environment model, dynamics, coordination mechanism to dynamic environment, imperfect sensors, communication constraints, and performance evaluation index have not been well addressed. The short term objectives of the proposed research are: to develop assistive robotic platforms with haptic feedback for manufacturing, medical applications and rehabilitation respectively, as well as sensing based motion control in the existence of limited measurement, uncertainties and disturbances; to propose numerous cooperative control strategies for multiple assistive robots for cooperative tasks in which a single robot is not enough to accomplish dexterous tasks, as well as to define performance indices in evaluating how to reach cooperative agreement, to optimize the useful information for feedback from multiple sources subject to communication constraints, and to address the robustness and synthesis issues among the multiple robotic systems. Specifically, the following issues are to be investigated: 1) Assistive robotic systems with haptic feedback - sensing and motion control; 2) Cooperative control of multi-assistive robotic systems with haptic feedback. Specifically, three applications will be investigated: i) Cooperative mobile manipulators; ii) Cooperative surgical robotic devices for tasks in confined workspace with haptic feedback; iii) Cooperative wearable exoskeleton robotic devices for rehabilitation.