Novel Human-Inspired Stability and Robustness Concepts for Human-Centred Robots and Biomedical Devices

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Dramatically increased life expectancy is a great achievement for humankind, but comes at a cost and poses a challenge to society that is not yet sufficiently addressed. In 2019, the Canadian Institute for Health Information reported more than 110,000 seniors' falls as cause for hospitalization, these representing a stunning 41% of all injury-related hospitalizations. Progress in assistive technologies in this field is a paramount and urgent challenge for Canadian and global society. Today, lack of fundamental advances in our understanding and ability to model stability and robustness of human motions remains a roadblock effective human-centered robotics design. Motion stability is achieved when the originally planned motion persists, even in the presence of perturbations. Robustness is the property describing the size of the stability regions around this motion. Stability and robustness are not inherent properties of a system, but of a particular motion of a system; they are among the most important properties of human and animal motion. Yet, how humans achieve them, even in fast and dynamic motions, is still far from being well understood. As a result, robots today still fail in stable motions, relying on much simpler heuristic concepts. Or, stability can only be achieved at the cost of such strong and heavy design that the robots pose a threat to humans and other vulnerable environments. The proposed Discovery Grant program aims to develop a base stability ontology through a set of performance indicators, allowing to capture and validate stability and robustness of human movement in terms of mathematical models, and transfer this knowledge into novel and applicable control concepts. No such model exists today. To establish such an ontology, we will collect very extensive motion data, including challenging motions in sports where stability control is pushed to its limits. The basic idea is that we will learn from these extreme situations in humans, for more standard situations in robots. We will validate the criteria and control mechanisms on existing human-centered robotics and biomedical devices, such as a full size humanoid robot, a lower limb exoskeleton and a robotic rollators, all available in our lab. Effective methods for control of perturbed stability in motions are not only needed for effective assistance to seniors, but for a full spectrum of medical applications, e.g. for care for patients with Parkinson's Disease or Cerebral Palsy. And application possibilities span beyond the healthcare sector. Robots enter our daily lives, e.g. as private service robots or cobots in manufacturing environments. For all these applications, stability and robustness is a key success factor, to allow the robots to move or interact with humans. Advances from this program will benefit Canada's AI, biomedical, and robotics industries, and students will become the next generation of innovators in these growing fields.