Cooperative Assistive Robotic Systems with Haptic Feedback: Sensing and Control

在过去的几十年里，随着机器人完成更复杂工作的需要，协作辅助机器人系统和技术受到越来越多的关注。本文提出的协作式辅助机器人系统的传感、控制和优化工作解决了控制研究人员面临的公认的主要挑战和机遇之一。研究结果将为协作机器人系统的发展奠定基础，这些系统在工业制造、军事应用、环境监测、运输、空间探索、医疗应用和卫生保健服务方面具有潜在的应用。本研究结果将有助业界提供操作便利及提高经济效益，并为需要医疗干预及身体协助的人士提供福利。与单个机器人相比，协作机器人系统具有更大的优势，如灵活性提高、处理能力提高、负载能力提高以及冗余增强的鲁棒性。由于整个系统的复杂性，许多现有工作缺乏协调战略的良好框架。传感和控制这两个关键组件的集成没有得到优化，需要针对特定应用进行协同设计。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、性能评价指标等问题尚未得到很好的解决。

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.